Liu X J, Hu H, Chang L, Zhang W, Li S Q, Wang Y Z
Department of Physics, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Phys Rev Lett. 2001 Jul 16;87(3):030404. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.87.030404. Epub 2001 Jul 2.
The ground state and its structure for a rotating, harmonically trapped N-boson system with a weak repulsive contact interaction are studied as the angular momentum L increases up to 3N. We show that the ground state is generally a fragmented condensate due to angular momentum conservation. In response to an (arbitrarily weak) asymmetric perturbation of the trap, however, the fragmented ground state can be transformed into a single condensate state. We manifest this intrinsic instability by calculating the conditional probability distributions, which show patterns analogous to the boson density distributions predicted by mean-field theory.
