Fragmented condensate ground state of trapped weakly interacting bosons in two dimensions

Spin-orbit coupled weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates in harmonic traps

We investigate theoretically the phase diagram of a spin-orbit coupled Bose gas in two-dimensional harmonic traps. We show that at strong spin-orbit coupling the single-particle spectrum decomposes into different manifolds separated by ℏω{⊥}, where ω{⊥} is the trapping frequency. For a weakly interacting gas, quantum states with Skyrmion lattice patterns emerge spontaneously and preserve either parity symmetry or combined parity-time-reversal symmetry. These phases can be readily observed in a spin-orbit coupled gas of ^{87}Rb atoms in a highly oblate trap.

Nucleation and growth of vortices in a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate

An analytic solution of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate of trapped atoms describes the onset of vorticity when the rotational speed is increased, starting with the entry of the first vortex and followed by the formation of growing symmetric Wigner molecules. It explains the staircase of angular momentum jumps and the behavior of the bosonic occupancies observed in numerical studies. The similarity of this behavior and mesoscopic superconductors is discussed.