title: Chaotic behavior of three interacting vortices in a confined Bose-Einstein condensate.
abstract: Motivated by recent experimental works, we investigate a system of vortex dynamics in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), consisting of three vortices, two of which have the same charge. These vortices are modeled as a system of point particles which possesses a Hamiltonian structure. This tripole system constitutes a prototypical model of vortices in BECs exhibiting chaos. By using the angular momentum integral of motion, we reduce the study of the system to the investigation of a two degree of freedom Hamiltonian model and acquire quantitative results about its chaotic behavior. Our investigation tool is the construction of scan maps by using the Smaller ALignment Index as a chaos indicator. Applying this approach to a large number of initial conditions, we manage to accurately and efficiently measure the extent of chaos in the model and its dependence on physically important parameters like the energy and the angular momentum of the system.
authors.affiliation: SUPA, Department of Physics and Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology, King's College, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen AB24 3UE, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Nikos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Kyriakopoulos
authors.affiliation: Physics Department, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, GR-54124 Thessaloniki, Greece.
authors.forename: Vassilis
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Koukouloyannis
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa.
authors.forename: Charalampos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Skokos
authors.affiliation: Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003-9305, USA.
authors.forename: Panayotis G
authors.initials: PG
authors.lastname: Kevrekidis