In this pedagogical introduction, I discuss theoretical aspects of superfluidity and superconductivity, mostly using a field-theoretical formalism. While the emphasis is on general concepts and mechanisms behind superfluidity, I also discuss various applications in low-energy and high-energy physics. Besides some introductory and standard topics such as superfluid helium and superfluidity in a simple scalar field theory, the lecture notes also include more advanced chapters, for instance discussions of the covariant two-fluid formalism and Cooper pairing with mismatched Fermi surfaces.
We map the infrared dynamics of a relativistic single-component (
N=1) interacting scalar field theory to that of nonrelativistic complex scalar fields. The Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation, describing the real-time dynamics of single-component ultracold Bose gases, is obtained at first nontrivial order in an expansion proportional to the powers of $\ensuremath{\lambda}{\ensuremath{\phi}}^{2}/{m}^{2}$ where $\ensuremath{\lambda}$, $\ensuremath{\phi}$, and
m are the coupling constant, the scalar field, and the particle mass respectively. Our analytical studies are corroborated by numerical simulations of the spatial and momentum structure of overoccupied scalar fields in (2+1)-dimensions. Universal scaling of infrared modes, vortex-antivortex superfluid dynamics, and the off-equilibrium formation of a Bose-Einstein condensate are observed. Our results for the universal scaling exponents are in agreement with those extracted in the numerical simulations of the GP equation. As in these simulations, we observe coarsening phase kinetics in the Bose superfluid with strongly anomalous scaling exponents relative to that of vertex resummed kinetic theory. Our relativistic field theory framework further allows one to study more closely the coupling between superfluid and normal fluid modes, specifically the turbulent momentum and spatial structure of the coupling between a quasiparticle cascade to the infrared and an energy cascade to the ultraviolet. We outline possible applications of the formalism to the dynamics of vortex-antivortex formation and to the off-equilibrium dynamics of the strongly interacting matter formed in heavy-ion collisions.
Under the assumption of two-fluid kinematics of a nonrelativistic Bose liquid in the presence of a local velocity field
v(x), local Galilei transformations are used to derive formulas for the spatial distribution of superfluidity. The local formulation is shown to subsume several descriptions of superfluidity, from Landau's free quasiparticle picture of the normal fluid to the fully microscopic winding number formula for superfluid density. We derive the superfluid distribution of generic pure states of one-dimensional bosonic systems by using the continuum analog of matrix product states. With a view toward spatially structured superfluid-based quantum devices, we consider the limits to local distillation of superfluidity within the framework of localized resource theories of quantum coherence.