Commensurability and hysteretic evolution of vortex configurations in rotating optical lattices

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of vortices within a harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate in a rotating optical lattice. Due to the competition between vortex-vortex interactions and pinning to the optical lattice we find a very complicated energy landscape, which leads to hysteretic evolution. The qualitative structure of the vortex configurations depends on the commensurability between the vortex density and the site density -- with regular lattices when these are commensurate, and concentric rings when they are not. We model the imaging of these structures by calculating time-of-flight column densities. As in the absence of the optical lattice, the vortices are much more easily observed in a time-of-flight image than \emph{in-situ}.