We study the thermal fluctuations of vortex positions in small vortex clusters in a harmonically trapped rotating Bose-Einstein condensate. It is shown that the order-disorder transition of two-shells clusters occurs via the decoupling of shells with respect to each other. The corresponding melting temperature depends stronly on the commensurability between numbers of vortices in shells. We show that melting can be achieved at experimentally attainable parameters and very low temperatures. Also studied is the effect of thermal fluctuations on vortices in an anisotropic trap with small quadrupole deformation. We show that thermal fluctuations lead to the decoupling of a vortex cluster from the pinning potential produced by this deformation. The decoupling temperatures are estimated and strong commensurability effects are revealed.
Three distinct types of behaviour have recently been identified in the two-dimensional trapped bosonic gas, namely; a phase coherent Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), a Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless-type (BKT) superfluid and normal gas phases in order of increasing temperature. In the BKT phase the system favours the formation of vortex-antivortex pairs, since the free energy is lowered by this topological defect. We provide a simple estimate of the free energy of a dilute Bose gas with and without such vortex dipole excitations and show how this varies with particle number and temperature. In this way we can estimate the temperature for cross-over from the coherent BEC to the (only) locally ordered BKT-like phase by identifying when vortex dipole excitations proliferate. Our results are in qualitative agreement with recent, numerically intensive, classical field simulations.
We find a novel topological defect in a spin-nematic superfluid theoretically. A quantized vortex spontaneously breaks its axisymmetry, leading to an elliptic vortex in nematic-spin Bose-Einstein condensates with small positive quadratic Zeeman effect. The new vortex is considered the Joukowski transform of a conventional vortex. Its oblateness grows when the Zeeman length exceeds the spin healing length. This structure is sustained by balancing the hydrodynamic potential and the elasticity of a soliton connecting two spin spots, which are observable by in situ magnetization imaging. The theoretical analysis clearly defines the difference between half quantum vortices of the polar and antiferromagnetic phases in spin-1 condensates.
We study stationary clusters of vortices and antivortices in dilute pancake-shaped Bose-Einstein condensates confined in nonrotating harmonic traps. Previous theoretical results on the stability properties of these topologically nontrivial excited states are seemingly contradicting. We clarify this situation by a systematic stability analysis. The energetic and dynamic stability of the clusters is determined from the corresponding elementary excitation spectra obtained by solving the Bogoliubov equations. Furthermore, we study the temporal evolution of the dynamically unstable clusters. The stability of the clusters and the characteristics of their destabilizing modes only depend on the effective strength of the interactions between particles and the trap anisotropy. For certain values of these parameters, there exist several dynamical instabilities, but we show that there are also regions in which some of the clusters are dynamically stable. Moreover, we observe that the dynamical instability of the clusters does not always imply their structural instability, and that for some dynamically unstable states annihilation of the vortices is followed by their regeneration, and revival of the cluster.
We provide a simple physical picture of the loss of coherence between two coherently split one-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates. The source of the dephasing is identified with nonlinear corrections to the elementary excitation energies in either of the two independent condensates. We retrieve the result by Burkov, Lukin and Demler [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 200404 (2007)] on the subexponential decay of the cocherence for the large time, however, the scaling of the characteristic decoherence time differs.
Interfacial profiles and interfacial tensions of phase-separated binary mixtures of Bose-Einstein condensates are studied theoretically. The two condensates are characterized by their respective healing lengths $xi_1$ and $xi_2$ and by the inter-species repulsive interaction $K$. An exact solution to the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equations is obtained for the special case $xi_2/xi_1 = 1/2$ and $K = 3/2$. Furthermore, applying a double-parabola approximation (DPA) to the energy density featured in GP theory allows us to define a DPA model, which is much simpler to handle than GP theory but nevertheless still captures the main physics. In particular, a compact analytic expression for the interfacial tension is derived that is useful for all $xi_1, xi_2$ and $K$. An application to wetting phenomena is presented for condensates adsorbed at an optical wall. The wetting phase boundary obtained within the DPA model nearly coincides with the exact one in GP theory.