Gross-Pitaevskii Theory of the Rotating Bose Gas

Abstract

We study the Gross-Pitaevskii functional for a rotating two-dimensional Bose gas in a trap. We prove that there is a breaking of the rotational symmetry in the ground state; more precisely, for any value of the angular velocity and for large enough values of the interaction strength, the ground state of the functional is not an eigenfunction of the angular momentum. This has interesting consequences on the Bose gas with spin; in particular, the ground state energy depends non-trivially on the number of spin components, and the different components do not have the same wave function. For the special case of a harmonic trap potential, we give explicit upper and lower bounds on the critical coupling constant for symmetry breaking.