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Physical Review Letters

Decay of Superfluid "Persistent Currents"

George Kukich, R. P. Henkel, J. D. Reppy

Published Jul 22, 1968• 49 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Superfluid persistent currents are observed to decay with a logarithmic time dependence for flow velocities near the critical velocity. The temperature dependence of the decay rate and the critical velocity obtained from the experiment are discussed in terms of a thermal activation picture.
DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.21.197

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We study how temperature affects the lifetime of a quantized, persistent current state in a toroidal Bose-Einstein condensate. When the temperature is increased, we find a decrease in the persistent current lifetime. Comparing our measured decay rates to simple models of thermal activation and quantum tunneling, we do not find agreement. We also measured the size of the hysteresis loops in our superfluid ring as a function of temperature, enabling us to extract the critical velocity. The measured critical velocity is found to depend strongly on temperature, approaching the zero-temperature mean-field solution as the temperature is decreased. This indicates that an appropriate definition of critical velocity must incorporate the role of thermal fluctuations, something not explicitly contained in traditional theories.
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We theoretically investigate the stochastic decay of persistent currents in a toroidal ultracold atomic superfluid caused by a perturbing barrier. Specifically, we perform detailed three-dimensional simulations to model the experiment of Kumar et al. in [Phys. Rev. A 95 021602 (2017)], which observed a strong temperature dependence in the timescale of superflow decay in an ultracold Bose gas. Our ab initio numerical approach exploits a classical-field framework that includes thermal fluctuations due to interactions between the superfluid and a thermal cloud, as well as the intrinsic quantum fluctuations of the Bose gas. In the low-temperature regime our simulations provide a quantitative description of the experimental decay timescales, improving on previous numerical and analytical approaches. At higher temperatures, our simulations give decay timescales that range over the same orders of magnitude observed in the experiment, however, there are some quantitative discrepancies that are not captured by any of the mechanisms we explore. Our results suggest a need for further experimental and theoretical studies into superflow stability.
We consider the changes in the spectrum of elementary excitations of a flowing superfluid that result when a weak external perturbing potential is added. As a specific application, we study the critical velocity of superfluid flow in a slightly distorted, tight, toroidal trap for atoms. The critical velocity is not accurately predicted by the argument that the flow turns dissipative when the local flow velocity exceeds the local speed of sound somewhere in the fluid. The unusual critical velocity probably reflects the essentially one-dimensional physics of the model.