Supercurrents and tunneling in massive many-vortex necklaces and star-lattices

Abstract

Recently, cold atoms mixtures have attracted broad interest due to their novel properties and exotic quantum effects with respect to single-component systems. In this paper the focus is on massive many-vortex states and their dynamics. Vortex configurations characterized by the same discrete rotational symmetry are investigated when confined within topologically nonequivalent geometries, and the relative stability properties at varying number of vortices and infilling mass are highlighted. It is numerically shown how massive many-vortex systems, in a mixture of Bose-Einstein condensates, can host the bosonic tunneling of the infilling component both in a disordered way, with tunneling events involving two or more close vortices, or in an almost-periodic way when the vortices are organized in persisting necklaces or star-lattices. The purpose is to explore a variety of situations involving the interplay between the highly-nonlinear vortex dynamics and the inter-vortex atomic transfer, and so to better understand the conditions for the onset of Josephson supercurrents in rotating systems, or to reveal phenomena that could be of interest for a future application e.g. in the context of atomtronics.