Universal coarsening of a two-dimensional Bose gas under conservative evolution

Abstract

We investigate the phase ordering dynamics of a uniform two-dimensional Bose gas quenched to a finite temperature in the superfluid phase. Starting from a defect-rich, far-from-equilibrium state, we model the subsequent evolution with the projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which conserves both energy and particle number. By tuning the initial energy, we control the effective post-quench temperature and examine its role in the equilibration dynamics. We find that the gas exhibits universal behaviour at all temperatures, evidenced by spatio-temporal scaling of correlation functions and power-law growth of the correlation length $\sim t^{1/z}$, with $z$ the dynamical critical exponent. We find $z$ to be temperature dependent, with $z \approx 1.5$ for post-quench temperatures just below the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) transition, and $z \approx 1.9$ for quenches to near-zero temperature. Analysis of the Porod tail of the momentum distribution suggests a temperature-dependent competition between vortices and sound waves in the coarsening process. The two-time correlation function also exhibits universal scaling, decaying as $\sim t^{-λ/z}$, with autocorrelation exponent $λ$. Near the BKT transition we obtain $λ\approx 2$, whereas $λ$ is found to diverge as the effective temperature approaches zero.