Vortices on demand in multicomponent Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

We present a simple mechanism to produce vortices at any desired spatial locations in harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC) with multicomponent spin states coupled to external transverse and axial magnetic fields. The vortices appear at the spatial points where the spin-transverse field interaction vanishes and, depending on the multipolar magnetic field order, the vortices can acquire different predictable topological charges. We explicitly demonstrate our findings, both numerically and analytically, by analyzing a 2D BEC via the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for atomic systems with either two or three internal states. We further show that, by an spontaneous symmetry breaking mechanism, vortices can appear in any spin component, unless symmetry is externally broken at the outset by an axial field. We suggest that this scenario may be tested using an ultracold gas of ${}^{87}$Rb occupying all three $F=1$ states in an optical trap.

11 pages, 9 figures, (Accepted in PRA)

References in corpus (5)

• Synthetic magnetic fields for ultracold neutral atoms
• Vortices and Superfluidity in a Strongly Interacting Fermi Gas
• Emergence of turbulence in an oscillating Bose-Einstein condensate
• Sculpting the Vortex State of a Spinor BEC
• Practical scheme for a light-induced gauge field in an atomic Bose gas

Cited by in corpus (8)

• Vortex reconnections in anisotropic trapped three-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates
• Quantum turbulence by vortex stirring in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate
• Validity of Gross-Pitaevskii solutions of harmonically confined BEC gases in reduced dimensions
• Skyrmion-string defects with arbitrary topological charges in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates
• Dynamics of dipoles and vortices in nonlinearly-coupled three-dimensional harmonic oscillators
• Macroscopic excitations in confined Bose-Einstein condensates, searching for quantum turbulence
• Investigation of 3D-Quantized Ring Vortices in Rotating Coupled Atom-Molecular BEC
• Half-vortex soliton lattices in spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensates with a quasi-flat band