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Physical Review A

Vortex nucleation in Bose-Einstein condensates due to effective magnetic fields

D. R. Murray, Patrik Öhberg, Damià Gomila, Stephen Mark Barnett

Published Jun 10, 2009• 16 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate the rotational properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in an effective magnetic field. The corresponding gauge potential is optically generated, and based on the adiabatic motion of the atoms. We demonstrate that the nucleation of vortices is seeded by instabilities in surface excitations and show that this picture also holds when the applied effective magnetic field is not homogeneous. The eventual configuration of vortices in the cloud depends on the geometry of the applied field.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.79.063618

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We investigate the rotational properties of a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in an effective magnetic field. The corresponding gauge potential is optically generated, and based on the adiabatic motion of the atoms. We demonstrate that the nucleation of vortices is seeded by instabilities in surface excitations and show that this picture also holds when the applied effective magnetic field is not homogeneous. The eventual configuration of vortices in the cloud depends on the geometry of the applied field.
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We report the observation of vortex nucleation in a rotating optical lattice. A 87Rb Bose-Einstein condensate was loaded into a static two-dimensional lattice and the rotation frequency of the lattice was then increased from zero. We studied how vortex nucleation depended on optical lattice depth and rotation frequency. For deep lattices above the chemical potential of the condensate we observed a linear dependence of the number of vortices created with the rotation frequency, even below the thermodynamic critical frequency required for vortex nucleation. At these lattice depths the system formed an array of Josephson-coupled condensates. The effective magnetic field produced by rotation introduced characteristic relative phases between neighboring condensates, such that vortices were observed upon ramping down the lattice depth and recombining the condensates.
Gauge fields are ubiquitous in modern quantum physics. In superfluids, quantized vortices can be induced by gauge fields. Here we demonstrate the first experimental observation of vortex nucleations in light-dressed spinor Bose-Einstein condensates under radially localized synthetic magnetic fields. The light-induced spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling creates azimuthal gauge potentials A[over →] for the lowest-energy spinor branch dressed eigenstate. The observation of the atomic wave function in the lowest-energy dressed eigenstate reveals that vortices nucleate from the cloud center of a vortex-free state with canonical momentum p[over →]=0. This is because a large circulating azimuthal velocity field ∝p[over →]-A[over →] at the condensate center results in a dynamically unstable localized excitation that initiates vortex nucleations. Furthermore, the long-time dynamics to reach the ground state stops in a metastable state when |A[over →]| is not sufficiently large. Our observation has reasonable agreement with the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii simulations.
We report on the observation of vortex formation in a Bose-Einstein condensate of 87Rb^{87}\text{R}\text{b}87Rb atoms. Vortices are generated by superimposing an oscillating excitation to the trapping potential introduced by an external magnetic field. For small amplitudes of the external excitation field we observe a bending of the cloud axis. Increasing the amplitude we observe formation of a growing number of vortices in the sample. Shot-to-shot variations in both vortex number and position within the condensed cloud are observed, probably due to the intrinsic vortex nucleation dynamics. We discuss the possible formation of vortices and antivortices in the sample as well as possible mechanisms for vortex nucleation.
We demonstrate that a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate can be effectively rotated by adding a real magnetic field to inputting gauge angular momentum, which is distinctly different from the traditional ways of rotation by stirring or Raman laser dressing to inputting canonical angular momentum. The gauge angular momentum is accompanied by the spontaneous generation of equal and opposite canonical angular momentum in the ground states, and it leads to the nucleation of quantized vortices. We explain this by indicating that the effective rotation with the vortex nucleation results from the effective magnetic flux induced by the gauge potential, which is essentially different from the previous scheme of creating vortices by synthetic magnetic fields. In the weakly interacting regime, symmetrically placed domains separated by vortex lines as well as half-integer giant vortices are discovered. With relatively strong interatomic interaction, we predict a structure of coaxially arranged annular vortex arrays, which is in stark contrast to the familiar Abrikosov vortex lattice. The developed way of rotation may be extended to a more general gauge system.