We consider the time-dependent Gross-Pitaevskii equation describing the
dynamics of rotating Bose-Einstein condensates and its discretization with the
finite element method. We analyze a mass conserving Crank-Nicolson-type
discretization and prove corresponding a priori error estimates with respect to
the maximum norm in time and the L2- and energy-norm in space. The estimates
show that we obtain optimal convergence rates under the assumption of
additional regularity for the solution to the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We
demonstrate the performance of the method in numerical experiments
