Rotating Bose-Einstein condensates with a finite number of atoms confined in a ring potential: Spontaneous symmetry breaking beyond the mean-field approximation

Abstract

Motivated by recent experiments on Bose-Einstein condensed atoms which rotate in annular and/or toroidal traps, we study the effect of the finiteness of the atom number $N$ on the states of lowest energy for a fixed expectation value of the angular momentum, under periodic boundary conditions. To attack this problem, we develop a general strategy, considering a linear superposition of the eigenstates of the many-body Hamiltonian, with amplitudes that we extract from the mean-field approximation. This many-body state breaks the symmetry of the Hamiltonian; it has the same energy to leading order in $N$ as the mean-field state and the corresponding eigenstate of the Hamiltonian, however, it has a lower energy to subleading order in $N$ and thus it is energetically favorable.