Vortices in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate: Critical angular velocities and energy diagrams in the Thomas-Fermi regime

Abstract

For a Bose-Einstein condensate placed in a rotating trap and confined in the z axis, we set a framework of study for the Gross-Pitaevskii energy in the Thomas Fermi regime. We investigate an asymptotic development of the energy, the critical velocities of nucleation of vortices with respect to a small parameter $\ep$ and the location of vortices. The limit $\ep$ going to zero corresponds to the Thomas Fermi regime. The non-dimensionalized energy is similar to the Ginzburg-Landau energy for superconductors in the high-kappa high-field limit and our estimates rely on techniques developed for this latter problem. We also take the advantage of this similarity to develop a numerical algorithm for computing the Bose-Einstein vortices. Numerical results and energy diagrams are presented.