Energy barriers for vortex nucleation in dipolar condensates

TL;DR

This paper investigates the energy barriers for vortex nucleation in dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates, comparing numerical solutions with analytical models across different interaction types.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive numerical analysis of vortex energy barriers in dipolar condensates, including comparison with analytical models and contact interaction cases.

Findings

Dipolar interactions significantly alter vortex nucleation energy barriers.

Good agreement between numerical results and pseudo-analytical models.

Comparison with contact interaction condensates highlights unique dipolar effects.

Abstract

We consider singly-quantized vortex states in a condensate of 52Cr atoms in a pancake trap. We obtain the vortex solutions by numerically solving the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in the rotating frame with no further approximations. The behavior of the condensate is studied under three different situations concerning the interactions: only s-wave, s-wave plus dipolar and only dipolar. The energy barrier for the nucleation of a vortex is calculated as a function of the vortex displacement from the rotation axis in the three cases. These results are compared to those obtained for contact interaction condensates in the Thomas-Fermi approximation, and to a pseudo-analytical model, showing this latter a very good agreement with the numerical calculation.