Formation of local and global currents in a toroidal Bose--Einstein condensate via an inhomogeneous artificial gauge field

Abstract

We study the effects of a position-dependent artificial gauge field on an atomic Bose--Einstein condensate in quasi-one-dimensional and two-dimensional ring settings. The inhomogeneous artificial gauge field can induce global and local currents in the Bose--Einstein condensate via phase gradients along the ring and vortices, respectively. We observe two different regimes in the system depending on the radial size of the ring and strength of the gauge field. For weak artificial gauge fields, the angular momentum increases, as expected, in a quantized manner; however, for stronger values of the fields, the angular momentum exhibits a linear (non-quantized) behavior. We also characterize the angular momentum for non-cylindrically symmetric traps.