Giant Vortex and the Breakdown of Strong Pinning in a Rotating Bose-Einstein Condensate

We consider a two-dimensional model for a rotating Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) in an anharmonic trap. The special shape of the trapping potential, negative in a central hole and positive in an annulus, favors an annular shape for the support of the wave function u. We study the minimizers of the energy in the Thomas-Fermi limit, where a small parameter ɛ tends to 0, for two different regimes of the rotational speed Ω. When Ω is independent …