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Register a new userStationary and non-stationary fluid flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate through a penetrable barrier
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We experimentally study the fluid flow induced by a broad, penetrable barrier moving through an elongated dilute gaseous Bose-Einstein condensate. The barrier is created by a laser beam swept through the condensate, and the resulting dipole potential can be either attractive or repulsive. We examine both cases and find regimes of stable and unstable fluid flow: At slow speeds of the barrier, the fluid flow is stationary due to the superfluidity of the condensate. At intermediate speeds, we observe a non-stationary regime in which the condensate gets filled with dark solitons. At faster speeds, soliton formation completely ceases and a remarkable absence of excitation in the condensate is seen again.
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The problem of the transcritical flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate through a wide repulsive penetrable barrier is studied analytically using the combination of the localized hydraulic solution of the 1D Gross-Pitaevskii equation and the solutions of the Whitham modulation equations describing the resolution of the upstream and downstream discontinuities through dispersive shocks. It is shown that within the physically reasonable range of parameters the downstream dispersive shock is attached to the barrier and effectively represents the train of very slow dark solitons, which can be observed in experiments. The rate of the soliton emission, the amplitudes of the solitons in the train and the drag force are determined in terms of the BEC oncoming flow velocity and the strength of the potential barrier. A good agreement with direct numerical solutions is demonstrated. Connection with recent experiments is discussed.
Formation of stationary 3D wave patterns generated by a small point-like impurity moving through a Bose-Einstein condensate with supersonic velocity is studied. Asymptotic formulae for a stationary far-field density distribution are obtained. Comparison with three-dimensional numerical simulations demonstrates that these formulae are accurate enough already at distances from the obstacle equal to a few wavelengths.
We investigate tunneling properties of Bogoliubov phonons in a Bose-Einstein condensate. We find the anomalous enhancement of the quasiparticle current $J_{rm q}$ carried by Bogoliubov phonons near a potential barrier, due to the supply of the excess current from the condensate. This effect leads to the increase of quasiparticle transmission probability in the low energy region found by Kovrizhin {it et al.}. We also show that the quasiparticle current twists the phase of the condensate wavefunction across the barrier, leading to a finite Josephson supercurrent $J_{rm s}$ through the barrier. This induced supercurrent flows in the opposite direction to the quasiparticle current so as to cancel out the enhancement of $J_{rm q}$ and conserve the total current $J=J_{rm q}+J_{rm s}$.
We consider the setup employed in a recent experiment (Ramanathan et al 2011 Phys. Rev. Lett. 106 130401) devoted to the study of the instability of the superfluid flow of a toroidal Bose-Einstein condensate in presence of a repulsive optical barrier. Using the Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field equation, we observe, consistently with what we found in Piazza et al (2009 Phys. Rev. A 80 021601), that the superflow with one unit of angular momentum becomes unstable at a critical strength of the barrier, and decays through the mechanism of phase slippage performed by pairs of vortex-antivortex lines annihilating. While this picture qualitatively agrees with the experimental findings, the measured critical barrier height is not very well reproduced by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, indicating that thermal fluctuations can play an important role (Mathey et al 2012 arXiv:1207.0501). As an alternative explanation of the discrepancy, we consider the effect of the finite resolution of the imaging system. At the critical point, the superfluid velocity in the vicinity of the obstacle is always of the order of the sound speed in that region, $v_{rm barr}=c_{rm l}$. In particular, in the hydrodynamic regime (not reached in the above experiment), the critical point is determined by applying the Landau criterion inside the barrier region. On the other hand, the Feynman critical velocity $v_{rm f}$ is much lower than the observed critical velocity. We argue that this is a general feature of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, where we have $v_{rm f}=epsilon c_{rm l}$ with $epsilon$ being a small parameter of the model. Given these observations, the question still remains open about the nature of the superfluid instability.
We have observed the persistent flow of Bose-condensed atoms in a toroidal trap. The flow persists without decay for up to 10 s, limited only by experimental factors such as drift and trap lifetime. The quantized rotation was initiated by transferring one unit, $hbar$, of the orbital angular momentum from Laguerre-Gaussian photons to each atom. Stable flow was only possible when the trap was multiply-connected, and was observed with a BEC fraction as small as 15%. We also created flow with two units of angular momentum, and observed its splitting into two singly-charged vortices when the trap geometry was changed from multiply- to simply-connected.
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