The non-classical scissors mode of a vortex lattice in a Bose-Einstein condensate

TL;DR

This paper reveals a very low frequency scissors mode in a vortex lattice within a Bose-Einstein condensate, caused by symmetry-breaking, which standard hydrodynamics cannot predict, and provides analytical formulas for its behavior.

Contribution

It introduces the discovery of a non-classical scissors mode in vortex lattices of Bose-Einstein condensates and derives analytical expressions for its frequency dependence.

Findings

The mode frequency tends to zero with decreasing trap anisotropy epsilon.

Standard hydrodynamics fails to predict this low frequency mode.

The mode frequency scales as sqrt(epsilon) in the low epsilon limit.

Abstract

We show that a Bose-Einstein condensate with a vortex lattice in a rotating anisotropic harmonic potential exhibits a very low frequency scissors mode. The appearance of this mode is due to the SO(2) symmetry-breaking introduced by the vortex lattice and, as a consequence of this, its frequency tends to zero with the trap anisotropy epsilon, with a generic sqrt(epsilon) dependence. We present analytical formulas giving the mode frequency in the low epsilon limit and we show that the mode frequency for some class of vortex lattices can tend to zero as epsilon or faster. We demonstrate that the standard classical hydrodynamics approach fails to reproduce this low frequency mode, because it does not contain the discrete structure of the vortex lattice.