Giant vortices in combined harmonic and quartic traps

Abstract

We consider a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate confined in combined harmonic and quartic traps, following recent experiments [V. Bretin, S. Stock, Y. Seurin and J. Dalibard, cond-mat/0307464]. We investigate numerically the behavior of the wave function which solves the three-dimensional Gross Pitaevskii equation. When the harmonic part of the potential is dominant, as the angular velocities $Omega$ increases, the vortex lattice evolves into a giant vortex. We also investigate a case not covered by the experiments or the previous numerical works: for strong quartic potentials, the giant vortex is obtained for lower $Omega$, before the lattice is formed. We analyze in detail the three dimensional structure of vortices.