No Arabic abstract
We investigate the zero-temperature excitation spectrum of two-dimensional soft-core bosons for a wide range parameters and across the phase transition from a superfluid to a supersolid state. Based on mean field calculations and recent Quantum Monte Carlo results, we demonstrate the applicability of the Bogoliubov-de Gennes equations, even at high interaction strengths where the system forms an insulating cluster crystal. Interestingly, our study reveals that the maximum energy of the longitudinal phonon band in the supersolid phase connects to the maxon energy of the superfluid at the phase transition.
We investigate quantum turbulence in a two-dimensional trapped supersolid and demonstrate that both the wave and vortex turbulence involve triple rather than dual cascades, as in a superfluid. Because of the presence of a second gapless mode associated with translation symmetry breaking, a new $k^{-13/3}$ scaling law is predicted to occur in the wave turbulence. Simultaneous fast vortex-antivortex creation and annihilation in the interior of the oscillating supersolid results in a $k^{-1}$ scaling law in the vortex turbulence. Numerical simulations based on the Gross-Pitaevskii equation confirmed the predictions.
One-dimensional bosons interacting via a soft-shoulder potential are investigated at zero temperature. The flatness of the potential at short distances introduces a typical length, such that, at relatively high densities and sufficiently strong interactions, clusters are formed, even in the presence of a completely repulsive potential. We evaluate the static density response function of this system across the transition from the liquid to the cluster liquid phases. Such quantity reveals the density modulations induced by a weak periodic external potential, and is maximal at the clustering wavevector. It is known that this response function is proportional to the static structure factor in the classical regime at high temperature, while for this zero-temperature quantum systems, we extract it from the dynamical structure factor evaluated with quantum Monte Carlo methods.
We study elementary low energy excitations inside a supersolid. We find that the coupling between the longitudinal lattice vibration mode and the superfluid mode leads to two longitudinal modes (one upper branch and one lower branch) inside the supersolid, while the transverse modes in the supersolid stay the same as those inside a normal solid. We also work out various experimental signatures of these novel elementary excitations by evaluating the Debye-Waller factor, density-density correlation, vortex loop-vertex loop interactions, specific heat and excess entropy from the vacancies per mole.
We show that the dynamics of cold bosonic atoms in a two-dimensional square optical lattice produced by a bichromatic light-shift potential is described by a Bose-Hubbard model with an additional effective staggered magnetic field. In addition to the known uniform superfluid and Mott insulating phases, the zero-temperature phase diagram exhibits a novel kind of finite-momentum superfluid phase, characterized by a quantized staggered rotational flux. An extension for fermionic atoms leads to an anisotropic Dirac spectrum, which is relevant to graphene and high-$T_c$ superconductors.
We investigate the transport of a Fermi gas with unitarity-limited interactions across the superfluid phase transition, probing its response to a direct current (dc) drive through a tunnel junction. As the superfluid critical temperature is crossed from below, we observe the evolution from a highly nonlinear to an Ohmic conduction characteristics, associated with the critical breakdown of the Josephson dc current induced by pair condensate depletion. Moreover, we reveal a large and dominant anomalous contribution to resistive currents, which reaches its maximum at the lowest attained temperature, fostered by the tunnel coupling between the condensate and phononic Bogoliubov-Anderson excitations. Increasing the temperature, while the zeroing of supercurrents marks the transition to the normal phase, the conductance drops considerably but remains much larger than that of a normal, uncorrelated Fermi gas tunneling through the same junction. We attribute such enhanced transport to incoherent tunneling of sound modes, which remain weakly damped in the collisional hydrodynamic fluid of unpaired fermions at unitarity.