  We consider a weakly-interacting, harmonically-trapped Bose-Einstein
condensed gas under rotation and investigate the connection between the
energies obtained from mean-field calculations and from exact diagonalizations
in a subspace of degenerate states. From the latter we derive an approximation
scheme valid in the thermodynamic limit of many particles. Mean-field results
are shown to emerge as the correct leading-order approximation to exact
calculations in the same subspace.
