Fragility of the Laughlin state in an anharmonically-trapped Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

When a Bose-Einstein condensate rotates in a purely harmonic potential with an angular frequency which is close to the trap frequency, its many-body state becomes highly correlated, with the most well-known being the bosonic Laughlin state. To take into account that in a real experiment no trapping potential is ever exactly harmonic, we introduce an additional weak, quartic potential and demonstrate that the Laughlin state is highly sensitive to this extra potential. Our results imply that achieving these states experimentally is essentially impossible, at least for a macroscopic atom number.