Abstract
We discuss in detail properties of trapped atomic condensates with anisotropic dipole interactions. A practical procedure for constructing anisotropic low-energy pseudopotentials is proposed and justified by the agreement with results of numerical multichannel calculations. The time dependent variational method is adapted to reveal several interesting features observed in numerical solutions of condensate wave function. Collective low-energy shape oscillations and their stability inside electric fields are investigated. Our results shed new light into macroscopic coherence properties of interacting quantum degenerate atomic gases.