Breaking of Chiral Symmetry and Spontaneous Rotation in a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate
Breaking of Chiral Symmetry and Spontaneous Rotation in a Spinor Bose-Einstein Condensate
We show that a spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate with ferromagnetic interactions spontaneously generates a topological spin texture, in which the $m=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1$ components of the magnetic sublevels form vortices with opposite circulations. This phenomenon originates from an interplay between ferromagnetic interactions and spin conservation.