Thomas-Fermi Description of Incoherent Light Scattering from an Atomic-Trap BEC

We present a Thomas-Fermi treatment of resonant incoherent scattering of low-intensity light by a dilute spatially confined Bose-Einstein condensate. The description gives simple analytical results and allows scattering data from finite-size condensates to be interpreted in terms of the properties of the homogeneous BEC-system. As an example, we show how the energy dispersion of the elementary excitations can be measured from scattering by a finite-size atomic-trap condensate. As a second example, we point out that a near-resonant scattering experiment can observe quasi-particle creation caused by particle annihilation.