We study the quench of a degenerate ultracold Bose gas to the unitary regime, where interactions are as strong as allowed by quantum mechanics. We lay the foundation of a cumulant theory able to simultaneously capture the three-body Efimov effect and ergodic evolution. After an initial period of rapid quantum depletion, a universal prethermal stage is established, characterized by a kinetic temperature and an emergent Bogoliubov dispersion law, while the microscopic degrees of freedom remain far from equilibrium. Integrability is then broken by higher-order interaction terms in the many-body Hamiltonian, leading to a momentum-dependent departure from power law to decaying exponential behavior of the occupation numbers at large momentum. We also find signatures of the Efimov effect in the many-body dynamics and make a precise identification between the observed beating phenomenon and the binding energy of an Efimov trimer. Throughout the paper, our predictions for a uniform gas are quantitatively compared with experimental results for quenched unitary Bose gases in uniform potentials.
Recently there has been renewed interest in second sound in superfluid Bose and Fermi gases. By using two-fluid hydrodynamic theory, we review the density response $\chi_{nn}(\bq,\omega)$ of these systems as a tool to identify second sound in experiments based on density probes. Our work generalizes the well-known studies of the dynamic structure factor $S(\bq,\omega)$ in superfluid
4He in the critical region. We show that, in the unitary limit of uniform superfluid Fermi gases, the relative weight of second vs. first sound in the compressibility sum rule is given by the Landau--Placzek ratio $\lp\equiv (\bar{c}_p-\bar{c}_v)/\bar{c}_v$ for all temperatures below
Tc. In contrast to superfluid
4He, $\lp$ is much larger in strongly interacting Fermi gases, being already of order unity for
T∼0.8Tc, thereby providing promising opportunities to excite second sound with density probes. The relative weights of first and second sound are quite different in $S(\bq,\omega)$ (measured in pulse propagation studies) as compared to $\mathrm{Im}\chi_{nn}(\bq,\omega)$ (measured in two-photon Bragg scattering). We show that first and second sound in $S(\bq,\omega)$ in a strongly interacting Bose-condensed gas are similar to those in a Fermi gas at unitarity. However, in a weakly interacting Bose gas, first and second sound are mainly uncoupled oscillations of the thermal cloud and condensate, respectively, and second sound has most of the spectral weight in $S(\bq,\omega)$. We also discuss the behaviour of the superfluid and normal fluid velocity fields involved in first and second sound.