  In this paper we combine concepts from Riemannian Optimization and the theory
of Sobolev gradients to derive a new conjugate gradient method for direct
minimization of the Gross-Pitaevskii energy functional with rotation. The
conservation of the number of particles constrains the minimizers to lie on a
manifold corresponding to the unit $L^2$ norm. The idea developed here is to
transform the original constrained optimization problem to an unconstrained
problem on this (spherical) Riemannian manifold, so that fast minimization
algorithms can be applied as alternatives to more standard constrained
formulations. First, we obtain Sobolev gradients using an equivalent definition
of an $H^1$ inner product which takes into account rotation. Then, the
Riemannian gradient (RG) steepest descent method is derived based on projected
gradients and retraction of an intermediate solution back to the constraint
manifold. Finally, we use the concept of the Riemannian vector transport to
propose a Riemannian conjugate gradient (RCG) method for this problem. It is
derived at the continuous level based on the "optimize-then-discretize"
paradigm instead of the usual "discretize-then-optimize" approach, as this
ensures robustness of the method when adaptive mesh refinement is performed in
computations. We evaluate various design choices inherent in the formulation of
the method and conclude with recommendations concerning selection of the best
options. Numerical tests demonstrate that the proposed RCG method outperforms
the simple gradient descent (RG) method in terms of rate of convergence. While
on simple problems a Newton-type method implemented in the {\tt Ipopt} library
exhibits a faster convergence than the (RCG) approach, the two methods perform
similarly on more complex problems requiring the use of mesh adaptation. At the
same time the (RCG) approach has far fewer tunable parameters.
