Off-Centered Vortices in Cylindrically Confined Condensates

We consider noncentered vortices and their arrays in a large cylindrically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate at zero temperature. Using the Thomas-Fermi approximation, we investigate the dependence of the kinetic energy and the angular momentum on the distance of an off-centered vortex with respect to the symmetry axis. We generalize the results to vortex arrays and give a physical insight of the smooth behavior of the angular momentum found experimentally.