Vortex patterns in a fast rotating Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

For a fast rotating condensate in a harmonic trap, we investigate the structure of the vortex lattice using wave functions minimizing the Gross-Pitaevskii energy in the lowest Landau level. We find that the minimizer of the energy in the rotating frame has a distorted vortex lattice for which we plot the typical distribution. We compute analytically the energy of an infinite regular lattice and of a class of distorted lattices. We find the optimal distortion and relate it to the decay of the wave function. Finally, we generalize our method to other trapping potentials. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.71.023611 © 2005 The American Physical Society