Collective excitations of vortex arrays in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate

N. L. Smith, W H Heathcote, J. M. Krueger +1 more

We have measured the precession frequency of a vortex lattice in a Bose-Einstein condensate of Rb87 atoms. The observed mode corresponds to a collective motion in which all the vortices in the array are tilted by a small angle with respect to the z axis (the symmetry axis of the trapping potential) and synchronously rotate about this axis. This motion corresponds to excitation of a Kelvin wave along the core of each vortex and we have verified that it has the handedness expected for such helical waves, i.e., precession in the opposite sense to the rotational flow around the vortices.

T. Kimura, Hiroki Saito, Masahito Ueda

S. Inouye, J. R. Abo-Shaeer, A. P. Chikkatur +10 more

Tapio Simula, K. Machida

We have calculated the low-lying elementary excitations of three-dimensional few-vortex arrays in trapped Bose-Einstein condensates. The number of different Kelvin-Tkachenko vortex wave branches found matches the number of vortices in the condensate. The lowest odd-parity modes exhibit superfluid gyroscopic vortex motion. Experimentally, these modes could be excited and observed individually or in connection with the formation and decay of quantum turbulence.

Enikő J. M. Madarassy, Carlo F. Barenghi

M. Guilleumas, Robert Graham

We consider noncentered vortices and their arrays in a cylindrically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature. We study the kinetic energy and the angular momentum per particle in the Thomas-Fermi regime and their dependence on the distance of the vortices from the center of the trap. Using a perturbative approach with respect to the velocity field of the vortices, we calculate, to first order, the frequency shift of the collective low-lying excitations due to the presence of an off-center vortex or a vortex array, and compare these results with predictions that would be obtained by the application of a simple sum-rule approach, previously found to be very successful for centered vortices. It turns out that the simple sum-rule approach fails for off-centered vortices.