Vortex Nucleations in Spinor Bose Condensates under Localized Synthetic Magnetic Fields

Gauge fields are ubiquitous in modern quantum physics. In superfluids, quantized vortices can be induced by gauge fields. Here we demonstrate the first experimental observation of vortex nucleations in light-dressed spinor Bose-Einstein condensates under radially localized synthetic magnetic fields. The light-induced spin-orbital-angular-momentum coupling creates azimuthal gauge potentials A[over →] for the lowest-energy spinor branch dressed eigenstate. The observation of the atomic wave function in the lowest-energy dressed eigenstate reveals that vortices nucleate from the cloud center of a vortex-free state with canonical momentum p[over →]=0. This is because a large circulating azimuthal velocity field ∝p[over →]-A[over →] at the condensate center results in a dynamically unstable localized excitation that initiates vortex nucleations. Furthermore, the long-time dynamics to reach the ground state stops in a metastable state when |A[over →]| is not sufficiently large. Our observation has reasonable agreement with the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii simulations.