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Physical Review Letters

Dissipation near the Critical Point of a Two-Dimensional Superfluid

Bernardo A. Huberman, Robert J. Myerson, Sebastian Doniach

Published Mar 20, 1978• 73 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We show that in a nonequilibrium, two-dimensional superfluid near the critical point, the energy for dissipative fluctuations is greatly reduced as a result of screening by the gas of bound vortex pairs, leading to an enhanced decay of the superfluid velocity. We also show that the superfluid density is reduced by a velocity-dependent amount as ${T}_{c}$ is approached from below.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.40.780

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We show that in a nonequilibrium, two-dimensional superfluid near the critical point, the energy for dissipative fluctuations is greatly reduced as a result of screening by the gas of bound vortex pairs, leading to an enhanced decay of the superfluid velocity. We also show that the superfluid density is reduced by a velocity-dependent amount as Tc{T}_{c}Tc​ is approached from below.
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We theoretically investigate superfluidity in a strongly interacting Fermi gas confined to two dimensions at finite temperature. Using a Gaussian pair fluctuation theory in the superfluid phase, we calculate the superfluid density and determine the critical temperature and chemical potential at the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition. We propose that the transition can be unambiguously demonstrated in cold-atom experiments by stirring the superfluid Fermi gas using a red-detuned laser beam, to identify the characteristic jump in the local Landau critical velocity at the superfluid-normal interface, as the laser beam moves across the cloud.
We investigate the maximum speed at which a driven superfluid can flow through a narrow constriction with a size on the order of the healing length. Considering dissipation via the thermal nucleation of quantized vortices, we calculate the critical velocity for superfluid 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He and ultracold atomtronic circuits, identify fundamental length, and velocity scales, and are thus able to present results obtained in widely different temperature and density ranges in a universal framework. For ultranarrow channels, we predict a drastic reduction in the critical velocity as the energy barrier for flow reducing thermally activated phase slip fluctuations is suppressed.
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Two-dimensional flow past an infinitely long cylinder of nanoscopic radius in superfluid 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He at zero temperature is studied using time-dependent density-functional theory. The calculations reveal two distinct critical phenomena for the onset of dissipation: (i) vortex-antivortex pair shedding from the periphery of the moving cylinder, and (ii) the appearance of cavitation in the wake, which possesses similar geometry to that observed experimentally for fast-moving micrometer-scale particles in superfluid 4He^{4}\mathrm{He}4He. The formation of cavitation bubbles behind the cylinder is accompanied by a sudden jump in the drag exerted on the moving cylinder by the fluid. Vortex pairs with the same circulation are occasionally emitted in the form of dimers, which constitute the building blocks for the Benard--von Karman vortex street structure observed in classical turbulent fluids and Bose-Einstein condensates. The cavitation-induced dissipation mechanism should be common to all superfluids that are self-bound and have a finite surface tension, which include the recently discovered self-bound droplets in ultracold Bose gases. These systems would provide an ideal testing ground for further exploration of this mechanism experimentally.