Driving quantized vortices with quantum vacuum fluctuations
Résumé
We propose to use a rotating corrugated material plate in order to stir, through the Casimir-Polder interaction, quantized vortices in an harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate. The emergence of such vortices within the condensate appears as a genuine signature of non-trivial geometry effects on the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations which fully exploits the superfluid nature of the sample. We calculate the exact non-perturbative Casimir-Polder potential, valid to all orders of the corrugation amplitude, felt by the atoms in front of the grating and show that the resulting quantum vacuum torque is strong enough to provide a contactless transfer of angular momentum to the condensate and generate quantized vortices under realistic experimental conditions at separation distances around 3 microns.