2013/06/30 by Aurel Bulgac, Michael McNeil Forbes, Michelle M. Kelley +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic and Subatomic Physics Research #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #cond-mat.quant-gas
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.112.025301
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 025301 (2014) · Minor changes to match published version, one new figure. Hi resolution figures and movies available at http://www.phys.washington.edu/~bulgac/media_files/VR
openalex publication_date 2014/01/16 · arxiv created 2014/02/11 · arxiv updated 2014/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
In a recent article, Yefsah et al. [Nature (London) 499, 426 (2013)] report the observation of an unusual excitation in an elongated harmonically trapped unitary Fermi gas. After phase imprinting a domain wall, they observe oscillations almost an order of magnitude slower than predicted by any theory of domain walls which they interpret as a "heavy soliton" of inertial mass some 200 times larger than the free fermion mass or 50 times larger than expected for a domain wall. We present compelling evidence that this "soliton" is instead a quantized vortex ring, by showing that the main aspects of the experiment can be naturally explained within the framework of time-dependent superfluid density functional theories.