Symmetry breaking in small rotating clouds of trapped ultracold Bose atoms

Abstract

We study the signatures of rotational and phase symmetry breaking in small rotating clouds of trapped ultracold Bose atoms by looking at rigorously defined condensate wave function. Rotational symmetry breaking occurs in narrow frequency windows, where the ground state of the system has degenerated with respect to the total angular momentum, and it leads to a complex wave function that exhibits vortices clearly seen as holes in the density, as well as characteristic vorticity. Phase symmetry (or gauge symmetry) breaking, on the other hand, is clearly manifested in the interference of two independent rotating clouds.