Abstract
We investigate the dynamics of pulses in a cigar-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate with repulsive atom-atom interactions without using Thomas-Fermi approximation. In the linear level our results give the Bogoliubov excitation spectrum for sound propagation with speed c = c0/(2)1/2, where c0 is the speed for the case without a trap. We develop a Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) description for dark soliton propagation in the system and show that it is the quantum pressure that contributes the dispersion necessary for the formation of the dark solitons.