Spontaneous circulation in ground-state spinor dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates

We report on a study of the spin-1 ferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensate with magnetic dipole-dipole interactions. By solving the nonlocal Gross-Pitaevskii equations for this system, we find three ground-state phases. Moreover, we show that a substantial orbital angular momentum accompanied by chiral symmetry breaking emerges spontaneously in a certain parameter regime. We predict that all these phases can be observed in the spin-1 Rb-87 condensate by changing the number of atoms or the trap frequency.