Engineering vortex rings and systems for controlled studies of vortex interactions in Bose-Einstein condensates

We study controlled methods of preparing vortex configurations in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and their use in the studies of fundamental vortex scattering, reconnection processes, and superfluid sound emission. We explore techniques of imprinting vortex rings by means of coherently driving internal atomic transitions with electromagnetic fields which exhibit singular phase profiles. In particular, we show that a vortex ring can be prepared by two focused co-propagating Gaussian laser beams. More complex vortex systems may also be imprinted by directly superposing simpler field configurations or by programming their phase profiles on optical holograms. We analyze specific examples of two merging vortex rings in a trapped two-species ⁸⁷Rb gas. We calculate the radiated sound energy in the reconnection process and show that the vortex relaxation and the redistribution of sound energy can be controlled by the imprinting process. As another creation technique, we study engineering pairs of two-dimensional point vortices in the condensates using a `light roadblock' in ultraslow light propagation. We show how this can be used to study vortex collisions in compressible superfluids and how these collisions result in energy dissipation via phonons and, sometimes, annihilation of vortex pairs.