Temperature dependence of the energy of a vortex in a two-dimensional Bose gas

Abstract

We evaluate the thermodynamic critical angular velocity Ωc(T) for creation of a vortex of lowest quantized angular momentum in a strictly two-dimensional Bose gas at temperature T, using a mean-field two-fluid model for the condensate and the thermal cloud. Our results show that (i) a Thomas-Fermi description of the condensate badly fails in predicting the particle density profiles and the energy of the vortex as functions of T; and (ii) an extrapolation of a simple Thomas-Fermi formula for Ωc(0) is nevertheless approximately useful up to T≃0.5Tc.