  The elastic oscillations of the vortex lattice of a cold Bose gas (Tkachenko
modes) are shown to play a crucial role in the saturation of the
compressibility sum rule, as a consequence of the hybridization with the
longitudinal degrees of freedom. The presence of the vortex lattice is
responsible for a $q^2$ behavior of the static structure factor at small
wavevectors $q$, which implies the absence of long range order in 2D
configurations at zero temperature. Sum rules are used to calculate the
Tkachenko frequency in the presence of harmonic trapping. Results are derived
in the Thomas-Fermi regime and compared with experiments as well as with
previous theoretical estimates.
