2012/07/31 by Amy C. Mathey, Charles W. Clark, Ludwig Mathey +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic physics #Bose–Einstein condensate #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Critical ionization velocity #Current (fluid) #Mechanics #Physics #Plasma #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Rectangular potential barrier #Strong Light-Matter Interactions #Superfluidity #Thermal #Thermal fluctuations #Thermodynamics #Toroid #Trap (plumbing) #Vortex #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.90.023604
published as Phys. Rev. A 90, 023604 (2014) · 15 pages. 11 figures
openalex publication_date 2014/08/04 · arxiv created 2014/08/23 · arxiv updated 2014/08/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Using a numerical implementation of the truncated Wigner approximation, we simulate the experiment reported by Ramanathan et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 130401 (2011), in which a Bose-Einstein condensate is created in a toroidal trap and set into rotation via a phase imprinting technique. A potential barrier is then placed in the trap to study the decay of the superflow. We find that the current decays via thermally activated phase slips, which can also be visualized as vortices crossing the barrier region in the radial direction. Adopting the notion of critical velocity used in the experiment, we determine it to be lower than the local speed of sound at the barrier, in contradiction to the predictions of the zero-temperature Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We map out the superfluid decay rate and critical velocity as a function of temperature and observe a strong dependence. Thermal fluctuations offer a partial explanation of the experimentally observed reduction of the critical velocity from the phonon velocity.