Oscillations of a rapidly rotating annular Bose-Einstein condensate

A time-dependent variational Lagrangian analysis based on the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional serves to study the dynamics of a metastable macroscopic central hole in a rapidly rotating Bose-Einstein condensate. The resulting oscillation frequencies of the core radius reproduce the trends seen in recent experiments [Engels et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 170405 (2003)], but the theoretical values are smaller by a factor ≈0.6--0.8.