Motivated by ongoing experimental efforts to make closed Bose-Einstein condensate shells in microgravity environments, this work studies the energy and dynamics of singly quantized vortices on a thin spherical superfluid shell, where the overall vortex charge must vanish (as on any compact surface). For each vortex, stereographic projection yields the corresponding complex potential on the tangent plane. The resulting stream function then provides both the total energy and the dynamics of a system of overall neutral vortices on a spherical film. Although a single-vortex dipole follows a simple dynamical orbit, four vortices can present a variety of situations. We study a few symmetric initial configurations and then focus on the special case of two small vortex dipoles.

• Received 22 January 2021
• Accepted 19 April 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.103.053306