We analyze theoretically the quantization of conductance occurring with cold bosonic atoms trapped in two reservoirs connected by a constriction with an attractive gate potential. We focus on temperatures slightly above the condensation threshold in
the reservoirs. We show that a conductance step occurs, coinciding with the appearance of a condensate in the constriction. Conductance relies on a collective process involving the quantum condensation of an atom into an elementary excitation and the subsequent quantum evaporation of an atom, in contrast with ballistic fermion transport. The value of the bosonic conductance plateau is strongly enhanced compared to fermions and explicitly depends on temperature. We highlight the role of weak repulsive interactions between the bosons in preventing them from collapsing into the constriction.
We consider a uniform superfluid confined in two compartments connected by a superleak and initially held at equal temperatures. If one of the two compartments is heated, a fraction of the superfluid will flow through the superleak. We show that, und
er certain thermodynamic conditions, the atoms flow from the hotter to the colder compartment, contrary to what happens in the fountain effect observed in superfluid Helium. This flow causes quantum degeneracy to increase in the colder compartment. In superfluid Helium, this novel thermomechanical effect takes place in the phonon regime of very low temperatures. In dilute quantum gases, it occurs at all temperatures below Tc . The increase in quantum degeneracy reachable through the adiabatic displacement of the wall separating the two compartments is also discussed.
Stability of dark solitons generated by a supersonic flow of Bose-Einstein condensate past an obstacle is investigated. It is shown that in the reference frame attached to the obstacle a transition occurs at some critical value of the flow velocity f
rom absolute instability of dark solitons to their convective instability. This leads to decay of disturbances of solitons at fixed distance from the obstacle and formation of effectively stable dark solitons. This phenomenon explains surprising stability of the flow picture that has been observed in numerical simulations.
In ultracold gases many experiments use atom imaging as a basic observable. The resulting image is averaged over a number of realizations and mostly only this average is used. Only recently the noise has been measured to extract physical information.
In the present paper we investigate the quantum noise arising in these gases at zero temperature. We restrict ourselves to the homogeneous situation and study the fluctuations in particle number found within a given volume in the gas, and more specifically inside a sphere of radius $R$. We show that zero-temperature fluctuations are not extensive and the leading term scales with sphere radius $R$ as $R^2ln R$ (or $ln R$) in three- (or one-) dimensional systems. We calculate systematically the next term beyond this leading order. We consider first the generic case of a compressible superfluid. Then we investigate the whole Bose-Einstein-condensation (BEC)-BCS crossover crossover, and in particular the limiting cases of the weakly interacting Bose gas and of the free Fermi gas.
