2008/07/31 by Bert Van Schaeybroeck, Achilleas Lazarides · 1 voice
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #cond-mat.other #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.supr-con
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.79.053612
published as Phys. Rev. A 79, 053612 (2009) · 11 pages, 5 figures
openalex publication_date 2009/05/08 · arxiv created 2009/05/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Recent experiments on imbalanced fermion gases have proved the existence of a sharp interface between a superfluid and a normal phase. We show that, at the lowest experimental temperatures, a temperature difference between normal (N) and superfluid (SF) phases can appear as a consequence of the blocking of energy transfer across the interface. Such blocking is a consequence of the existence of a SF gap, which causes low-energy normal particles to be reflected from the N-SF interface. Our quantitative analysis is based on the Hartree-Fock--Bogoliubov--de Gennes formalism, which allows us to give analytical expressions for the thermodynamic properties and characterize the possible interface scattering regimes, including the case of unequal masses. Our central result is that the thermal conductivity is exponentially small at the lowest experimental temperatures.