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arXiv:cond-mat/0607098

Critical velocities for a superfluid in a periodic potential

Biao Wu, Junren Shi

Published Jul 5, 2006• 0 citations
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Abstract

In contrast to the homogeneous superfluid which has only one critical velocity, there exist two critical velocities for a superfluid in a periodic potential. The first one, which we call inside critical velocity, is for a macroscopic impurity to move frictionlessly in the periodic superfluid system; the second, which is called trawler critical velocity, is the largest velocity of the lattice relative to the lab frame for the superfluidity to maintain. The results are relevant to the superfluidity observed in the Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice and supersolid helium.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0607098

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In contrast to the homogeneous superfluid which has only one critical velocity, there exist two critical velocities for a superfluid in a periodic potential. The first one, which we call inside critical velocity, is for a macroscopic impurity to move frictionlessly in the periodic superfluid system; the second, which is called trawler critical velocity, is the largest velocity of the lattice relative to the lab frame for the superfluidity to maintain. The results are relevant to the superfluidity observed in the Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice and supersolid helium.
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We investigate the drag force on a moving impurity in a spin-orbit-coupled Bose-Einstein condensate. We prove rigorously that the superfluid critical velocity is zero when the impurity moves in all directions but one, in contrast to the case of liquid helium and superconductor, where it is finite in all directions. We also find that when the impurity moves in all directions except the two special ones, the drag force has nonzero transverse component with a small velocity. When the velocity becomes large and the states of the upper band are also excited, the transverse force becomes very small due to opposite contributions of the two bands. The characteristics of the superfluid critical velocity and the transverse force are results of the order-by-disorder mechanism in spin-orbit-coupled boson systems.
We study the effects of an external periodic potential on the critical velocity of a superfluid Fermi gas in the crossover between the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) phase and Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). We numerically solve the Bogoliubov--de Gennes equations to model a three-dimensional gas of ultracold atoms in the superfluid phase flowing through a one-dimensional optical lattice. We find that when the recoil energy is comparable to the Fermi energy, the presence of the periodic potential reduces the effect of pair-breaking excitations. This behavior is a consequence of the peculiar band structure of the quasiparticle energy spectrum in the lattice. When the lattice height is much larger than the Fermi energy, the periodic potential makes pairs of atoms to be strongly bound, even in the BCS regime, and pair-breaking excitations are further suppressed. We have also found that when the recoil energy is comparable to or larger than the Fermi energy, the critical velocity due to long-wavelength phonon excitations shows a nonmonotonic behavior along the BCS-BEC crossover.
We investigate the superfluid properties of a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) trapped in a one-dimensional periodic potential. We study, both analytically (in the tight binding limit) and numerically, the Bloch chemical potential, the Bloch energy and the Bogoliubov dispersion relation, and we introduce two different, density dependent, effective masses and group velocities. The Bogoliubov spectrum predicts the existence of sound waves, and the arising of energetic and dynamical instabilities at critical values of the BEC quasi-momentum which dramatically affect its coherence properties. We investigate the dependence of the dipole and Bloch oscillation frequencies in terms of an effective mass averaged over the density of the condensate. We illustrate our results with several animations obtained solving numerically the time-dependent Gross–Pitaevskii equation.
We study superfluidity of supersolid phases of dipolar Bose gases in two-dimensional optical lattices. We perform linear stability analyses for the corresponding dipolar Bose-Hubbard model in the hard-core boson limit to show that a supersolid can have stable superflow until the flow velocity reaches a certain critical value. The critical velocity for the supersolid is found to be significantly smaller than that for a conventional superfluid phase. We propose that the critical velocity can be used as a signature to identify the superfluidity of the supersolid phase in experiment.
We numerically model experiments on the superfluid critical velocity of an elongated, harmonically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate as reported by [P. Engels and C. Atherton, Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 160405 (2007)]. These experiments swept an obstacle formed by an optical dipole potential through the long axis of the condensate at constant velocity. Their results found an increase in the resulting density fluctuations of the condensate above an obstacle velocity of v≈0.3v\approx 0.3v≈0.3 mm/s, suggestive of a superfluid critical velocity substantially less than the average speed of sound. However, our analysis shows that the that the experimental observations of Engels and Atherton are in fact consistent with a superfluid critical velocity equal to the local speed of sound. We construct a model of energy transfer to the system based on the local density approximation to explain the experimental observations, and propose and simulate experiments that sweep potentials through harmonically trapped condensates at a constant fraction of the local speed of sound. We find that this leads to a sudden onset of excitations above a critical fraction, in agreement with the Landau criterion for superfluidity.