Matter-Wave Vortices in Engineered Nanostructures

A great challenge to taking the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) from being an object of fundamental interest to one of wide-ranging application is to make the system producing and using the BEC portable. Atom chips promise this and produce BECs on the submicron scale, while optical lattices are the ideal engineering tool to manipulate the condensate at this level, but to actually use such BECs a very fundamental question must still be answered - how does a condensate flow through nanoscale structures? This project answers this question by considering the key signature of superfluid flow, the vortex - how vortices appear in these structures, and ultimately how superfluid flow may be controlled by manipulating the form of the nanostructure.