Collective excitations in vortices and vortex lattices

Abstract

Emergent lattices at mesoscopic length scales have evoked interest in several recent contexts, e.g., in crystalline arrangements of skyrmions. It is a challenging task to determine their collective excitations as the unit cells are large and can contain complex textures. We address this issue in the oldest known example of an emergent mesoscopic lattice, the vortex lattice in a superfluid. We show that a tight binding approach can successfully describe collective modes. We begin with a single isolated vortex in a two dimensional system. With suitable pinning mechanims, the low energy excitations take the form of localized pairing fluctuations. They can be viewed as wave-like disturbances that propagate around the vortex centre, in the azimuthal direction. In particular, the lowest energy excitations are gyrotropic and breathing modes. The former corresponds to circular motion of the eye of the vortex, while the latter represents an oscillation between sharper and broader vortex profiles. These modes are `bosonic' analogues of atomic orbitals with the vortex profile playing the role of the nuclear potential. Moving to a sparse vortex lattice with well separated vortices, the single-vortex excitations provide a convenient basis for finding normal modes. We derive an analogue of Bloch's theorem in this context, revealing a non-trivial phase contribution arising from the orbital field. We set up a tight binding prescription and use it to explicitly determine the band structure of excitations about a square vortex lattice. Our results can be tested in ultracold atomic gases with synthetic magnetic fields.