Vortices and Rotation

Andreas H. Trabesinger

Linghua Wen, Hongwei Xiong, Biao Wu

We study vortex formation in a Bose-Einstein condensate in a rotating double-well potential. In addition to the ordinary quantized vortices and elusive ghost vortices, ``hidden'' vortices are found distributed along the central barrier. These hidden vortices are invisible like ghost vortices but carry angular momentum. Moreover, their core size is not given by the healing length, but is strongly influenced by the external potential. We find that the Feynman rule can be well satisfied only after including the hidden vortices. There is no critical rotation frequency for the formation of hidden vortices while there is one for the formation of ordinary visible vortices. Hidden vortices can be revealed in the free expansion of Bose-Einstein condensates. In addition, the hidden vortices in a Bose-Einstein condensate can appear in other external potentials, such as a rotating anisotropic toroidal trap.

Anonymous

Hidetsugu Sakaguchi, Boris A. Malomed

We report on results of a systematic analysis of two-dimensional solitons and localized vortices in models including a rotating periodic potential and the cubic nonlinearity, with the latter being both self-attractive and self-repulsive. The models apply to Bose-Einstein condensates stirred by rotating optical lattices and to twisted photonic-crystal fibers, or bundled arrays of waveguides, in nonlinear optics. In the case of the attractive nonlinearity, we construct compound states in the form of vortices, quadrupoles, and supervortices, all trapped in the slowly rotating lattice, and identify their stability limits (fundamental solitons in this setting were studied previously). In rapidly rotating potentials, vortices decouple from the lattice in the azimuthal direction and assume an annular shape. In the model with the repulsive nonlinearity, which was not previously explored in this setting, gap solitons and vortices are found in both cases of the slow and rapid rotations. It is again concluded that the increase in the rotation frequency leads to the transition from fully trapped corotating vortices to ring-shaped ones. We also study ``crater-shaped'' vortices in the attraction model, which, unlike their compound counterparts, are trapped, essentially, in one cell of the lattice. Previously, only unstable vortices of this type were reported. We demonstrate that they have a certain stability region. Solitons and vortices are found here in the numerical form, and, in parallel, by means of the variational approximation.

Subrata Das, K. Mukherjee, Sonjoy Majumder

We conduct a theoretical study of the creation and dynamics of vortices in a two-dimensional binary Bose-Einstein condensate with a mass imbalance between the species. To initiate the dynamics, we use one or two rotating paddle potentials in one species, while the other species is influenced only via the interspecies interaction. In both species, the number and the dominant sign of the vortices are determined by the rotation frequency of the paddle potential. Clusters of positive and negative vortices form at a low rotation frequency comparable to that of the trap when using the single paddle potential. In contrast, vortices of the same sign tend to dominate as the rotation frequency of the paddle increases, and the angular momentum reaches a maximum value at a paddle frequency where the paddle velocity becomes equal to the sound velocity of the condensate. When the rotation frequency is sufficiently high, the rapid annihilation of vortex-antivortex pairs significantly reduces the number of vortices and antivortices in the system. For two paddle potentials rotating in the same direction, the vortex dynamics phenomenon is similar to that of a single paddle. However, when the paddle potentials are rotated in the opposite direction, both positive- and negative-signed vortices occur at all rotational frequencies. At the low rotation frequencies, the cluster of like-signed vortices produces the ${k}^{\ensuremath{-}5/3}$ and ${k}^{\ensuremath{-}3}$ power laws in the incompressible kinetic energy spectrum at low and high wave numbers, respectively, a hallmark of the quantum turbulent flows.

Sarah Tomlin