Topological defect formation in quenched ferromagnetic Bose-Einstein condensates

We study the dynamics of the quantum phase transition of a ferromagnetic spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensate from the polar phase to the broken-axisymmetry phase by changing magnetic field, and find the spontaneous formation of spinor domain walls followed by the creation of polar-core spin vortices. We also find that the spin textures depend very sensitively on the initial noise distribution, and that an anisotropic and colored initial noise is needed to reproduce the Berkeley experiment [Sadler et al., Nature 443, 312 (2006)]. The dynamics of vortex nucleation and the number of created vortices depend also on the manner in which the magnetic field is changed. We point out an analogy between the formation of spin vortices from domain walls in a spinor BEC and that of vortex-antivortex pairs from dark solitons in a scalar BEC.