Superfluid excitations in rotating two-dimensional ring traps

Abstract

We studied a rotating Bose–Einstein condensate confined in ring trap configurations that can be produced starting with a bubble trap confinement, approximated by a Mexican hat and shift harmonic oscillator potentials. Using a variational technique and perturbation theory, we determined the vortex configurations in this system by varying the interparticle interaction and the angular velocity of the atomic cloud. We found that the phase diagram of the system has macrovortex structures for small positive values of the interaction parameter, and the charge of the central vortex increases with rotation. Strengthening the atomic interaction makes the macrovortex unstable, and it decays into multiple singly charged vortices that arrange themselves in a lattice configuration. We also look for experimentally realizable methods to determine the vortex configuration without relying upon absorption imaging since the structures are not always visible in the latter. More specifically, we study how the vortex distribution affects the collective modes of the condensate by solving the Gross–Pitaevskii equation numerically and by analytical predictions using the sum-rule approach for the frequencies of the modes. These results reveal important signatures to characterize the macrovortices and vortex lattice transitions in the experiments.