26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Creating edge states of vortex lattices in Bose-Einstein condensates

Not scheduled

20m

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Contributed Oral AIP | Quantum Science and Technology (QST)

Speaker

Mason Clarke (the University of Queensland)

Description

Edge states are excitations in many-body systems that are spatially localised at the boundary. They exhibit desirable properties such as dissipationless transport and robustness against disorder. These features stem from a topological origin, and are central to phenomena like the quantum Hall effect and topological insulators.

In a rotating planar Bose–Einstein condensates (BECs), the ground state forms a triangular lattice of quantized vortices. While the linear normal modes of such vortex lattices have been well studied$^1$, recent theoretical work by Bogatskiy and Wiegmann$^2$ predicts the existence of nonlinear solitonic edge states which are the hydrodynamic analogue of the edge states of the fractional quantum Hall effect.

Here we search for solitonic edge excitations in finite systems within the nonlinear regime of the point vortex model. We compare the point vortex and Gross-Pitaevskii representations of vortex lattices, and consider the Chern numbers attached to isolated energy bands. We further explore the feasibility of experimentally observing these edge states in ultracold atomic BECs $^3$.

1) L. J. Campbell, Transverse normal modes of finite vortex arrays, Physical Review A 24, 514 (1981).
2) A. Bogatskiy and P. Wiegmann, Edge wave and boundary layer of vortex matter, Physical Review
Page 106AIP summer meeting 2025 / Book of Abstracts
Letters 122, 214505 (2019).
3) T. W. Neely et al., Melting of a vortex matter Wigner crystal, arXiv:2402.09920 (2024).