Vortices in ultracold dilute atomic gases have generally been associated with external rotation, with many beautiful experimental observations. The transformation to a rotating frame of reference involves a vector gauge field A = M Ω x r , leading to a uniform effective magnetic field. Recently, other synthetic gauge fields have been created, leading to many dramatic new phenomena such as vortices in nonrotating condensates [1] and effective spin-orbit coupling [2]. The latter possibility raises many issues about the structure and dynamics of a vortex in a spin-orbit system. I report on progress in understanding these questions.

[1] Y-J Lin et al., Nature 462, 628 (2009).
[2] Y-J Lin et al., Nature 471 , 83 (2011).