Stable Core Symmetries and Confined Textures for a Vortex Line in a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate

Phys Rev Lett. 2016 Feb 26;116(8):085301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.116.085301. Epub 2016 Feb 25.

Abstract

We show how a singly quantized vortex can exhibit energetically stable defect cores with different symmetries in an atomic spin-1 polar Bose-Einstein condensate, and how a stable topologically nontrivial Skyrmion texture of lower dimensionality can be confined inside the core. The core isotropy and the stability of the confined texture are sensitive to Zeeman level shifts. The observed structures have analogies, respectively, in pressure-dependent symmetries of superfluid liquid ^{3}He vortices and in the models of superconducting cosmic strings.