Vortex Nucleation and Array Formation in a Rotating Bose-Einstein Condensate

We study the dynamics of vortex lattice formation of a rotating trapped Bose-Einstein condensate by numerically solving the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation, and find that the condensate undergoes elliptic deformation, followed by unstable surface-mode excitations before forming a quantized vortex lattice. The dependence of the number of vortices on the rotation frequency is obtained.