Physica Scripta
The viscosity of dilute Bose–Einstein condensates
Erich D. Gust, L. E. Reichl
Abstract
The viscosity of a dilute Bose–Einstein condensate is obtained for a range of temperatures and densities. The kinetic equation used to derive the viscosity is based on Bogoliubov mean field theory and is a Boltzmann-like equation for the Bogoliubov excitations in the condensate. The viscosity can be assigned a numerical value for any gas for which the mass and scattering length are known. The viscosity decreases slowly as the temperature is decreased, but at low temperature (around 0.01 T c ), begins to show a much more rapid decrease with decreasing temperature. This interesting behavior of the viscosity is related to the behavior of the eigenvalues of the bogolon collision operator at these low temperatures.