We study the process of vortex nucleation in rotating two-dimensional BEC
confined in a harmonic trap. We show that, within the Gross-Pitaevskii theory
with the boundary condition of vanishing of the order parameter at infinity,
topological defects nucleation occurs via the creation of vortex-antivortex
pairs far from the cloud center, where the modulus of the order parameter is
small. Then, vortices move towards the center of the cloud and antivortices
move in the opposite direction but never disappear. We also discuss the role of
surface modes in this process.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure
