  We apply a hyperspherical formulation to a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate
with dipolar and contact interactions. Central to this approach is a general
correspondence between K-harmonic hyperspherical methods and a suitable
Gaussian ansatz to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, regardless of the form of the
interparticle potential. This correspondence allows one to obtain
hyperspherical potential energies for a wide variety of physical problems. In
the case of the dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate, this motivates the inclusion
of a beyond-mean field term within the hyperspherical picture, which allows us
to describe the energies and wavefunctions of excitations of self-bound dipolar
droplets outside of the mean-field limit.
