Energetic stability of coreless vortices in spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with conserved magnetization

Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Feb 21;112(7):075301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.075301. Epub 2014 Feb 19.

Abstract

We show that conservation of longitudinal magnetization in a spinor condensate provides a stabilizing mechanism for a coreless vortex phase-imprinted on a polar condensate. The stable vortex can form a composite topological defect with distinct small- and large-distance topology: the inner ferromagnetic coreless vortex continuously deforms toward an outer singular, singly quantized polar vortex. A similar mechanism can also stabilize a nonsingular nematic texture in the polar phase. A weak magnetization is shown to destabilize a coreless vortex in the ferromagnetic phase.