Noncanonical vortex states and dynamics in Bose-Einstein condensates

Abstract

Vortex excitations triggered by nonlinear interactions in Bose-Einstein condensates have attracted interest in the study of ultracold atoms. However, most studies focus on canonical vortex states with integer topological charges. In this paper, we study the dynamic properties of noncanonical vortex condensates with three phase distributions: power-exponent, new type power-exponent and oscillation type. The results show that the noncanonical vortices are dynamic unstable and their density distributions obviously depend on the phase parameters of the initial optical phase masks. Different noncanonical vortices decay into canonical clusters with diverse configurations showing rich topological excitation patterns. In particular, a new power exponential noncanonical vortex state decays into a stable canonical polygonal vortex cluster structure. Because the phase structures of the noncanonical optical vortices destroy the rotational symmetry of the condensate, the angular momentum of the condensate is no longer quantized, and its value changes with the power of the azimuthal angle of the optical field or the oscillation frequency, which is obviously different from the evolution of the corresponding noncanonical vortex optical field itself. In the dynamical process, the center-of-mass trajectory of noncanonical vortex condensates with the new type of power exponent phase is always a point, while for the noncanonical vortex condensates with power exponent and oscillating phase, the center-of-mass trajectories are ellipses centering at the origin of coordinates.