On the Third Critical Speed for Rotating Bose-Einstein Condensates

We study a two-dimensional rotating Bose-Einstein condensate confined by an anharmonic trap in the framework of the Gross-Pitaevksii theory. We consider a rapid rotation regime close to the transition to a giant vortex state. It was proven in [M. Correggi {\it et al}, {\it J. Math. Phys. \textbf{53}(2012)] that such a transition occurs when the angular velocity is of order $\varepsilon ^{-4}$, with $\varepsilon ^{-2}$ denoting the coefficient of the nonlinear term in the Gross-Pitaevskii functional and $\varepsilon \ll 1$ (Thomas-Fermi regime). In this paper we identify a finite value $\Omega_{\mathrm{c}}$ such that, if $\Omega = \Omega_0/\varepsilon ^4$ with $\Omega_0 > \Omega_{\mathrm{c}}$, the condensate is in the giant vortex phase. Under the same condition we prove a refined energy asymptotics and an estimate of the winding number of any Gross-Pitaevskii minimizer.