Bosons in a Trap: A Rigorous Derivation of the Gross-Pitaevskii Energy Functional

The ground state properties of interacting Bose gases in external potentials, as considered in recent experiments, are usually described by means of the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional. We present here the first proof of the asymptotic exactness of this approximation for the ground state energy and particle density of a dilute Bose gas with a positive interaction.