It is well known that the charge current in a conductor is proportional to the applied electric field. This famous relation, known as Ohms law, is the result of relaxation of the current due to charge carriers undergoing collisions, predominantly wit
h impurities and lattice vibrations in the material. The field of spintronics, where the spin of the electron is manipulated rather than its charge, has recently also led to interest in spin currents. Contrary to charge currents, these spin currents can be subject to strong relaxation due to collisions between different spin species, a phenomenon known as spin drag. This effect has been observed for electrons in semi-conductorscite{Weber} and for cold fermionic atoms, where in both cases it is reduced at low temperatures due to the fermionic nature of the particles. Here, we perform a transport experiment using ultra-cold bosonic atoms and observe spin drag for bosons for the first time. By lowering the temperature we find that spin drag for bosons is enhanced in the quantum regime due to Bose stimulation, which is in agreement with recent theoretical predictions. Our work on bosonic transport shows that this field may be as rich as transport in solid-state physics and may lead to the development of advanced devices in atomtronics.
We study the propagation of a density wave in a magnetically trapped Bose-Einstein condensate at finite temperatures. The thermal cloud is in the hydrodynamic regime and the system is therefore described by the two-fluid model. A phase-contrast imagi
ng technique is used to image the cloud of atoms and allows us to observe small density excitations. The propagation of the density wave in the condensate is used to determine the speed of sound as a function of the temperature. We find the speed of sound to be in good agreement with calculations based on the Landau two-fluid model.
