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.

doi:10.1103/physreva.93.013607

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.

Authors

A. Rakonjac

A.L. Marchant

T.P. Billam

J.L. Helm

M.M.H. Yu

Professor Simon Gardiner s.a.gardiner@durham.ac.uk
Professor

Professor Simon Cornish s.l.cornish@durham.ac.uk
Professor

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	1050-2947
Electronic ISSN	1094-1622
Publisher	American Physical Society
Peer Reviewed	Peer Reviewed
Volume	93
Issue	1
Article Number	013607
DOI	https://doi.org/10.1103/physreva.93.013607
Related Public URLs	http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04897

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