We make a systematic study of the resonant mode coupling of the collective excitations at zero temperature in a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). (i) Based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation we derive a set of nonlinearly coupled envelope equations for a three-mode resonant interaction (TMRI) by means of a method of multiple scales. (ii) We calculate the coupling matrix elements for the TMRI and show that the divergence appearing in previous studies can be eliminated completely by using a Fetter-like variational approximation for the ground-state wave function of the condensate. (iii) We provide the selection rules in mode-mode interaction processes [including TMRI and second-harmonic generation (SHG)] according to the symmetry of the excitations. (iv) By solving the nonlinearly coupled envelope equations we obtain divergence-free nonlinear amplitudes for the TMRI and SHG processes and show that our theoretical results on the shape oscillations of the condensate agree well with the experimental ones. We suggest also an experiment to check the theoretical prediction of the present study on the TMRI of collective excitations in a BEC.
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