Adiabatic preparation of vortex lattices

By engineering appropriate artificial gauge potentials, a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) can be adiabatically loaded into a current-carrying state that is analogous to a vortex lattice of a rotating uniform Bose gas. We give two explicit, experimentally feasible protocols by which vortex lattices can be smoothly formed from a condensate initially at rest. In the first example we show how this can be achieved by adiabatically loading a uniform BEC into an optical flux lattice, formed from coherent optical coupling of internal states of the atom. In the second example we study a tight-binding model that is continuously manipulated in parameter space such that it smoothly transforms into the Harper-Hofstadter model with 1/3 flux per plaquette.