Landau levels and the Thomas-Fermi structure of rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensates

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  • 18 March 2004
Abstract
We show that the density profile of a rapidly rotating harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate will be of the Thomas-Fermi inverted parabolic form as long as the number of vortices is much larger than unity. Two modifications of the condensate wave function of a rapidly rotating from lowest Landau level (LLL) with a regular lattice of vortices are explored; in the first we multiply the usual LLL wave function by a slowly varying envelope function, which gives rise to components in higher Landau levels; in the second we retain the LLL form of the condensate but relax the requirement that the vortices lie on a regular lattice. Performing variational calculations for the two cases, we find it most favorable energetically to retain the LLL form of the wave function but to allow the vortices to deviate slightly from a regular lattice. Marked changes in the density profile are, as we see, accompanied by reduction in the energy of only several percent.

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