The non-classical scissors mode of a vortex lattice in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We show that a Bose-Einstein condensate with a vortex lattice in a rotating anisotropic harmonic potential exhibits a very low frequency scissors mode. The appearance of this mode is due to the SO(2) symmetry-breaking introduced by the vortex lattice and, as a consequence of this, its frequency tends to zero with the trap anisotropy epsilon, with a generic sqrt(epsilon) dependence. We present analytical formulas giving the mode frequency in the low epsilon limit and we show that the mode frequency for some class of vortex lattices can tend to zero as epsilon or faster. We demonstrate that the standard classical hydrodynamics approach fails to reproduce this low frequency mode, because it does not contain the discrete structure of the vortex lattice.