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arXiv:2208.02499 · SciPost Physics

Controlling superfluid flows using dissipative impurities

Martin Will, Jamir Marino, Herwig Ott, Michael Fleischhauer

Published Apr 6, 2023• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We propose and analyze a protocol to create and control the superfluid flow in a one dimensional, weakly interacting Bose gas by noisy point contacts. Considering first a single contact in a static or moving condensate, we identify three different dynamical regimes: I. a linear response regime, where the noise induces a coherent flow in proportion to the strength of the noise, II. a Zeno regime with suppressed currents, and III. a regime of continuous soliton emission. Generalizing to two point contacts in a condensate at rest we show that noise tuning can be employed to control or stabilize the superfluid transport of particles along the segment which connects them.

DOI
10.21468/scipostphys.14.4.064

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We propose and analyze a protocol to create and control the superfluid flow in a one dimensional, weakly interacting Bose gas by noisy point contacts. Considering first a single contact in a static or moving condensate, we identify three different dynamical regimes: I. a linear response regime, where the noise induces a coherent flow in proportion to the strength of the noise, II. a Zeno regime with suppressed currents, and III. a regime of continuous soliton emission. Generalizing to two point contacts in a condensate at rest we show that noise tuning can be employed to control or stabilize the superfluid transport of particles along the segment which connects them.
We use ultracold atoms in a quasiperiodic lattice to study two outstanding problems in the physics of disordered systems: a) the anomalous diffusion of a wavepacket in the presence of disorder, interactions and noise; b) the transport of a disordered superfluid.a) Our results show that the subdiffusion, observed when interaction alone is present, can be modelled with a nonlinear diffusion equation and the peculiar shape of the expanding density profiles can be connected to the microscopic nonlinear diffusion coefficients.Also when noise alone is present we can describe the observed normal diffusion dynamics by existing microscopic models.In the unexplored regime in which noise and interaction are combined, instead, we observe an anomalous diffusion, that we model with a generalized diffusion equation, where noise-and interaction-induced contributions add each other.b) We find that an instability appearing at relatively large momenta can be employed to locate the fluid-insulator crossover driven by disorder.By investigating the momentum-dependent transport, we observe a sharp crossover from a weakly dissipative regime to a strongly unstable one at a disorder-dependent critical momentum.The set of critical disorder and interaction strengths for which such critical momentum vanishes, can be identified with the separation between a fluid regime and an insulating one and can be related to the predicted zero-temperature superfluid-Bose glass transition.
We prepare a Bose-Einstein condensed gas in a three-dimensional optical lattice and study the excitation spectrum of the superfluid phase for different interaction strengths. We probe the response of the system by modulating the depth of the optical lattice along one axis. The interactions can be controlled independently by varying the tunnel coupling along the other two lattice axes. In the weakly interacting regime we observe a small susceptibility of the superfluid to excitations, while for stronger interactions an unexpected resonance appears in the excitation spectrum. In addition we measure the coherent fraction of the atomic gas, which determines the depletion of the condensate.
The many-body dissipative flow induced by a mobile Gaussian impurity harmonically oscillating within a cigar-shaped Bose-Einstein condensate is investigated. For very small and large driving frequencies the superfluid phase is preserved. Dissipation is identified, for intermediate driving frequencies, by the nonzero value of the drag force whose abrupt increase signals the spontaneous downstream emission of an array of gray solitons. After each emission event, typically each of the solitary waves formed decays and splits into two daughter gray solitary waves that are found to be robust propagating in the bosonic background for large evolution times. In particular, a smooth transition toward dissipation is observed, with the critical velocity for solitary wave formation depending on both the characteristics of the obstacle, namely its driving frequency and width as well as on the interaction strength. The variance of a sample of single-shot simulations indicates the fragmented nature of the system; here it is found to increase during evolution for driving frequencies where the coherent structure formation becomes significant. Finally, we demonstrate that for fairly large particle numbers in situ single-shot images directly capture the gray soliton's decay and splitting.
A few years ago, flow equations were introduced as a technique for calculating the ground-state energies of cold Bose gases with and without impurities[1,2]. In this paper, we extend this approach to compute observables other than the energy. As an example, we calculate the densities, and phase fluctuations of one-dimensional Bose gases with one and two impurities. For a single mobile impurity, we use flow equations to validate the mean-field results obtained upon the Lee-Low-Pines transformation. We show that the mean-field approximation is accurate for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as the phase coherence length is much larger than the healing length of the condensate. For two static impurities, we calculate impurity-impurity interactions induced by the Bose gas. We find that leading order perturbation theory fails when boson-impurity interactions are stronger than boson-boson interactions. The mean-field approximation reproduces the flow equation results for all values of the boson-impurity interaction strength as long as boson-boson interactions are weak.
The flow of a uniform Bose gas at speeds greater than the Landau critical velocity vc{v}_{c}vc​ does not necessarily destroy superfluidity, but rather needs only to lead to a decrease of the superfluid mass density ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}$. Analyzing a weakly interacting Bose gas with a finite-range interparticle interaction that leads to a Landau critical velocity at nonzero quasiparticle momentum, we explicitly construct the (nonuniform) condensate for fluid flow faster than vc{v}_{c}vc​ and calculate the accompanying decrease in ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{s}$. We briefly comment on the relation of the physics to other problems in superfluids, e.g., solitons and vortices in Bose-Einstein condensates, and critical currents in superconductors.
Point contacts provide simple connections between macroscopic particle reservoirs. In electric circuits, strong links between metals, semiconductors, or superconductors have applications for fundamental condensed-matter physics as well as quantum information processing. However, for complex, strongly correlated materials, links have been largely restricted to weak tunnel junctions. We studied resonantly interacting Fermi gases connected by a tunable, ballistic quantum point contact, finding a nonlinear current-bias relation. At low temperature, our observations agree quantitatively with a theoretical model in which the current originates from multiple Andreev reflections. In a wide contact geometry, the competition between superfluidity and thermally activated transport leads to a conductance minimum. Our system offers a controllable platform for the study of mesoscopic devices based on strongly interacting matter.