Abstract
We have observed the persistent flow of Bose-condensed atoms in a toroidal trap. The flow persists without decay for up to 10 s, and was initiated by transferring one unit, ħ, of the orbital angular momentum from Laguerre-Gaussian photons to each atom. Stable flow was only possible when the trap was multiply-connected, and was observed with a BEC fraction as small as 15%. We also created flow with two units of angular momentum, and observed its splitting into two singly-charged vortices when the trap geometry was changed from multiply- to simply-connected.
© 2007 Optical Society of America
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