Measuring the disorder of vortex lattices in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Rakonjac, A.; Marchant, A.L.; Billam, T.P.; Helm, J.L.; Yu, M.M.H.; Gardiner, S.A.; Cornish, S.L.

Abstract

We report observations of the formation and subsequent decay of a vortex lattice in a Bose-Einstein condensate confined in a hybrid optical-magnetic trap. Vortices are induced by rotating the anharmonic magnetic potential that provides confinement in the horizontal plane. We present simple numerical techniques based on image analysis to detect vortices and analyze their distributions. We use these methods to quantify the amount of order present in the vortex distribution as it transitions from a disordered array to the energetically favorable ordered lattice.

Citation

Rakonjac, A., Marchant, A., Billam, T., Helm, J., Yu, M., Gardiner, S., & Cornish, S. (2016). Measuring the disorder of vortex lattices in a Bose-Einstein condensate. Physical Review A, 93(1), Article 013607. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.93.013607

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 10, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Jan 11, 2016
• Publication Date: Jan 11, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jan 14, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 20, 2016
• Journal: Physical Review A
• Print ISSN: 2469-9926
• Electronic ISSN: 2469-9934
• Publisher: American Physical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 93
• Issue: 1
• Article Number: 013607
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.93.013607
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1394756
• Related Public URLs: http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04897