Vortex lattices in theory and practice

The formal simplicity of ideal point vortex systems in two dimensions has long attracted interest in both their exact solutions and in their capacity to simulate physical processes. Attention here is focused on infinite, two-fold periodic vortex arrays, including an expression for the energy density of an arbitrary vortex lattice (i.e., an arbitrary number of vortices with arbitrary strengths in a unit cell parallelogram of arbitrary shape). For the case of two vortices per unit cell, the morphology of stable lattices can be described completely. A non-trivial physical realization of such lattices is a rotating mixture of He-3 and He-4 at temperatures so low that both isotopic components are superfluid. The structure of the expected lattices is quite different from the usual triangular structure. Magnetic flux lines in high-temperature superconductors show a one-parameter family of degenerate ground state of the lattice due to the anisotropy of the vortex-vortex interaction. A final topic, closely related to Josephson-junction arrays, is the case of vortices confined to a grid. That is, the vortices interact pair-wise in the usual manner but are constrained to occupy only locations on an independent periodic grid. By using vortex relaxation methods in the continuum and then imposing the grid it is possible to find low-lying states extremely rapidly compared to previous Monte Carlo calculations.