Spontaneous Crystallization of Skyrmions and Fractional Vortices in the Fast-rotating and Rapidly-quenched Spin-1 Bose-Einstein Condensates

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how rapid rotation and quenching induce spontaneous formation of skyrmion and vortex lattices in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates, revealing new topological defect patterns.

Contribution

It introduces a method to generate and visualize topological defect lattices in spinor BECs through combined fast rotation and thermal quench.

Findings

Hexagonal skyrmion lattice in ferromagnetic BEC

Square lattice of half-quantized vortices in antiferromagnetic BEC

Defect patterns observable via polarization-dependent phase-contrast imaging

Abstract

We investigate the spontaneous generation of crystallized topological defects via the combining effects of fast rotation and rapid thermal quench on the spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates. By solving the stochastic projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we show that, when the system reaches equilibrium, a hexagonal lattice of skyrmions, and a square lattice of half-quantized vortices can be formed in a ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic spinor BEC, respetively, which can be imaged by using the polarization-dependent phase-contrast method.