Non-existence of vortices in the small density region of a condensate (Q2429768)

It is proved that the ground state of the Gross-Pitaevskii energy describing a Bose-Einstein condensate at low rotation does not have vortices in the low density region. Therefore, the first ground state with vortices has its vortices in the bulk. Such a result is obtained by proving that for small rotational velocities, the ground state is multiple of the ground state with zero rotation. In the proof it is essentially used sharp bounds of the decay of the wave function combined with weighted Jacobian estimates.