No Arabic abstract
Quantum vortex reconnections can be considered as a fundamental unit of interaction in complex turbulent quantum gases. Understanding the dynamics of single vortex reconnections as elementary events is an essential precursor to the explanation of the emergent properties of turbulent quantum gases. It is thought that a lone pair of quantum vortex lines will inevitably interact given a sufficiently long time. This paper investigates aspects of reconnections of quantum vortex pairs imprinted in a Bose-Einstein condensate held in an anisotropic three dimensional trap using an exact many-body treatment. In particular the impact of the interaction strength and the trap anisotropy in the reconnection time is studied. It is found that interaction strength has no effect on reconnection time over short time scales and that the trap anisotropy can cause the edge of the condensate to interfere with the reconnection process. It is also found that the initially coherent system fragments very slowly, even for relatively large interaction strength, and therefore the system likes to stay condensed during the reconnections.
Reconnections and interactions of filamentary coherent structures play a fundamental role in the dynamics of fluids, plasmas and nematic liquid crystals. In fluids, vortex reconnections redistribute energy and helicity among the length scales and induce fine-scale turbulent mixing. Unlike ordinary fluids where vorticity is a continuous field, in quantum fluids vorticity is concentrated into discrete (quantized) vortex lines turning vortex reconnections into isolated events, making it conceptually easier to study. Here we report experimental and numerical observations of three-dimensional quantum vortex interactions in a cigar-shaped atomic Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC). In addition to standard reconnections, already numerically and experimentally observed in homogeneous systems away from boundaries, we show that double reconnections, rebounds and ejections can also occur as a consequence of the non-homogeneous, confined nature of the system.
We report on the creation of three-vortex clusters in a $^{87}Rb$ Bose-Einstein condensate by oscillatory excitation of the condensate. This procedure can create vortices of both circulation, so that we are able to create several types of vortex clusters using the same mechanism. The three-vortex configurations are dominated by two types, namely, an equilateral-triangle arrangement and a linear arrangement. We interpret these most stable configurations respectively as three vortices with the same circulation, and as a vortex-antivortex-vortex cluster. The linear configurations are very likely the first experimental signatures of predicted stationary vortex clusters.
We study the changes in the spatial distribution of vortices in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate due to an increasing anisotropy of the trapping potential. Once the rotational symmetry is broken, we find that the vortex system undergoes a rich variety of structural changes, including the formation of zig-zag and linear configurations. These spatial re-arrangements are well signaled by the change in the behavior of the vortex-pattern eigenmodes against the anisotropy parameter. The existence of such structural changes opens up possibilities for the coherent exploitation of effective many-body systems based on vortex patterns.
In this work we present a systematic study of the three-dimensional extension of the ring dark soliton examining its existence, stability, and dynamics in isotropic harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensates. Detuning the chemical potential from the linear limit, the ring dark soliton becomes unstable immediately, but can be fully stabilized by an external cylindrical potential. The ring has a large number of unstable modes which are analyzed through spectral stability analysis. Furthermore, a few typical destabilization dynamical scenarios are revealed with a number of interesting vortical structures emerging such as the two or four coaxial parallel vortex rings. In the process of considering the stability of the structure, we also develop a modified version of the degenerate perturbation theory method for characterizing the spectra of the coherent structure. This semi-analytical method can be reliably applied to any soliton with a linear limit to explore its spectral properties near this limit. The good agreement of the resulting spectrum is illustrated via a comparison with the full numerical Bogolyubov-de Gennes spectrum. The application of the method to the two-component ring dark-bright soliton is also discussed.
We introduce topologically stable three-dimensional skyrmions in the cyclic and biaxial nematic phases of a spin-2 Bose-Einstein condensate. These skyrmions exhibit exceptionally high mapping degrees resulting from the versatile symmetries of the corresponding order parameters. We show how these structures can be created in existing experimental setups and study their temporal evolution and lifetime by numerically solving the three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equations for realistic parameter values. Although the biaxial nematic and cyclic phases are observed to be unstable against transition towards the ferromagnetic phase, their lifetimes are long enough for the skyrmions to be imprinted and detected experimentally.