Physics of Quantum Fluids

亮五 久保, 文彦 高野

Lauren Aycock, Srivatsan Chakram, John Lombard +1 more

Phuong Mai Dinh, Jesús Navarro, E. Suraud

Quantum fluids are fluids, indeed. We have seen in the previous chapter what it means from a classical physics point of view. But quantum fluids are by definition ruled by quantum physics, as well. The goal of this chapter is to introduce some key concepts of quantum physics necessary to understand what makes a fluid a quantum one or rather what quantum property makes an ensemble of particles a quantum fluid. We are here precisely at the edge of our basic intuition of quantum physics. Indeed, one usually associates the notion of quantum object to a microscopic nature and it may thus a priori seem paradoxical to link the word quantum to a macroscopic object, such as the notion of fluid. Thinking it over a bit deeper, quantum physics is certainly present at all scales and we are confronted with quantum mechanics through the many electronic devices which have invaded our everyday life. And it actually turns out that, as we will see later on, most of these quantum devices are directly connected to the notion of quantum fluids, the case of electron fluids being certainly the most common one in such devices. Quantum physics has for sure deeply modified our everyday life. But it has also changed our perception of the world, and as we shall see in this chapter, it is precisely this new vision of the world which allows us to understand the concept of quantum fluids underlying so many physical systems.

Vu B Ho

In our previous works, we suggest that quantum particles are composite physical objects endowed with the geometric and topological structures of their corresponding differentiable manifolds that would allow them to imitate and adapt to physical environments. In this work, we show that Dirac equation in fact describes quantum particles as composite structures that are in a fluid state in which the components of the wavefunction can be identified with the stream function and the velocity potential of a potential flow formulated in the theory of classical fluids. We also show that Dirac quantum particles can manifest as standing waves which are the result of the superposition of two fluid flows moving in opposite directions. However, for a steady motion a Dirac quantum particle does not exhibit a wave motion even though it has the potential to establish a wave within its physical structure, therefore, without an external disturbance a Dirac quantum particle may be considered as a classical particle defined in classical physics. And furthermore, from the fact that there are two identical fluid flows in opposite directions within their physical structures, the fluid state model of Dirac quantum particles can be used to explain why fermions are spin-half particles.