Higher-order dispersion can lead to intriguing dynamics that are becoming a focus of modern hydrodynamics research. Such systems occur naturally, for example in shallow water waves and nonlinear optics, for which several types of novel dispersive shocks structures have been identified. Here we introduce ultracold atoms as a tunable quantum simulations platform for higher-order systems. Degenerate quantum gases are well controlled model systems for the experimental study of dispersive hydrodynamics in superfluids and have been used to investigate phenomena such as vortices, solitons, dispersive shock waves and quantum turbulence. With the advent of Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling, the dispersion of a dilute gas Bose-Einstein condensate can be modified in a flexible way, allowing for detailed investigations of higher-order dispersion dynamics. Here we present a combined experimental and theoretical study of shock structures generated in such a system. The breaking of Galilean invariance by the spin-orbit coupling allows two different types of shock structures to emerge simultaneously in a single system. Numerical simulations suggest that the behavior of these shock structures is affected by interactions with vortices in a manner reminiscent of emerging viscous hydrodynamics due to an underlying quantum turbulence in the system. This result suggests that spin-orbit coupling can be used as a powerful means to tun the effective viscosity in cold-atom experiments serving as quantum simulators of turbulent hydrodynamics, with applications from condensed matter and optics to quantum simulations of neutron stars.
We show that in the collision of two superfluid fermionic atomic clouds one observes the formation of quantum shock waves as discontinuities in the number density and collective flow velocity. Domain walls, which are topological excitations of the superfluid order parameter, are also generated and exhibit abrupt phase changes by $π$ and slower motion than the shock waves. The domain walls are distinct from the gray soliton train or number density ripples formed in the wake of the shock waves and observed in the collisions of superfluid bosonic atomic clouds. Domain walls with opposite phase ju…
We study the formation and dynamics of shock waves initiated by a repulsive potential in a superfluid unitary Fermi gas by using the order-parameter equation. In the theoretical framework, the regularization process of shock waves mediated by the quantum pressure term is purely dispersive. Our results show good agreement with the experiment of Joseph {\it et al}. [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 106}, 150401 (2011)]. We reveal that the boxlike-shaped density peak observed in the experiment consists of many vortex rings due to the transverse instability of the dispersive shock wave. In addition, we study…
We theoretically investigate the generation of the vortex dipoles in superfluid Fermi gas in the BCS limit. The vortex dipoles are generated in superfluid either by moving an obstacle above a critical speed or due to the decay of the shock waves obtained on the sudden mixing of two superfluid fragments. We observe that in pancake-shaped traps, the shock waves can lead to the formation of density ripples, which decay into vortex dipoles due to the onset of snake instability.
We study the propagation of dispersive waves in superfluid Fermi gases in the BEC-BCS crossover. Unlike in other superfluid systems, where dispersive waves have already been studied and observed, Fermi gases can exhibit a subsonic dispersion relation for which the dispersive wave pattern appears at the tail of the wave front. We show that this property can be used to distinguish between a subsonic and a supersonic dispersion relation at unitarity.
We study the recently proposed effective field theory for the phonon of an arbitrary non-relativistic superfluid. After computing the one-loop phonon self-energy, we obtain the low temperature T contributions to the phonon dispersion law at low momentum, and see that the real part of those can be parametrized as a thermal correction to the phonon velocity. Because the phonons are the quanta of the sound waves, at low momentum their velocity should agree with the speed of sound. We find that our results match at order T^4ln(T) with those predicted by Andreev and Khalatnikov for the speed of sou…
The piston shock problem is a prototypical example of strongly nonlinear fluid flow that enables the experimental exploration of fluid dynamics in extreme regimes. Here we investigate this problem for a nominally dissipationless, superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate and observe rich dynamics including the formation of a plateau region, a non-expanding shock front, and rarefaction waves. Many aspects of the observed dynamics follow predictions of classical dissipative---rather than superfluid dispersive---shock theory. The emergence of dissipative-like dynamics is attributed to the decay of larg…
Paraxial fluids of light represent an alternative platform to atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and superfluid liquids for the study of the quantum behaviour of collective excitations. A key step in this direction is the precise characterization of the Bogoliubov dispersion relation, as recently shown in two experiments. However, the predicted interferences between the phonon excitations that would be a clear signature of the collective superfluid behaviour have not been observed to date. Here, by analytically, numerically, and experimentally exploring the phonon phase-velocity, we observe the …
Families of dark solitons exist in superfluid Fermi gases. The energy-velocity dispersion and number of depleted particles completely determines the dynamics of dark solitons on a slowly-varying background density. For the unitary Fermi gas we determine these relations from general scaling arguments and conservation of local particle number. We find solitons to oscillate sinusoidally at the trap frequency reduced by a factor of $1/\sqrt{3}$. Numerical integration of the time-dependent Bogoliubov-de Gennes equation determines spatial profiles and soliton dispersion relations across the BEC-BCS …
The low-energy modes of a superfluid atomic Fermi gas at zero temperature are investigated. The Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) side of the superfluid phase is studied in detail. The atoms are assumed to be in only one internal state, so that for a sufficiently diluted gas the pairing of fermions can be considered effective in the l=1 channel only. In agreement with previous works on p-wave superfluidity in Fermi systems, it is found that the $p_x+ip_y$ phase represents the lowest energy state in both the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) and BEC sides. Our calculations show that at low energy th…
--In this article we study the hydrodynamic spectrum of a superfluid confined in a cylindrical trap. We show that the dispersion relation $ω$(q) of the phonon branch scales like $\sqrt$ q at large q, leading to a vanishingly small superfluid critical velocity. In practice the critical velocity is set by the breakdown of the hydrodynamic approximation. For a broad class of superfluids, this entails a reduction of the critical velocity by a factor ($ω$ $\perp$ /ï1/2c) 1/3 with respect to the free-space prediction (here $ω$ $\perp$ is the trapping frequency and ï1/2c the chemical potential of the…
We present a detailed analysis of the contribution of small-angle Nambu-Goldstone boson (phonon) collisions to the shear viscosity, $η$, in a superfluid atomic Fermi gas close to the unitarity limit. We show that the experimental values of the shear viscosity coefficient to entropy ratio, $η/s$, obtained at the lowest reached temperature can be reproduced assuming that phonons give the leading contribution to $η$. The phonon contribution is evaluated considering $1 \leftrightarrow 2$ processes and taking into account the finite size of the experimental system. In particular, for very low tempe…
A two-component two-dimensional (2D) dipolar bosonic system in the bilayer geometry is considered. By performing quantum Monte Carlo simulations in a wide range of layer spacings we analyze in detail the pair correlation functions, the static response function, the kinetic and interaction energies. By reducing the layer spacing we observe a transition from weakly to strongly bound dimer states. The transition is accompanied by the onset of short-range correlations, suppression of the superfluid response, and rotonization of the excitation spectrum. A dispersion law and a dynamic structure fact…
We consider a 3D homogeneous superfluid at low temperature $T$ with 2 types of excitations, gapless phonons with a linear dispersion relation at low wavenumber, and gapped quasiparticles with a quadratic dispersion relation around extrema. We calculate the scattering amplitude of a phonon on a quasiparticle to leading order in $T$ for all subsonic quasiparticle velocities, with a $S$-matrix formalism between exact asymptotic states dressed by virtual phonons. We then characterize the erratic motion of the quasiparticle in the superfluid due to its unceasing collisions with thermal phonons thro…
We investigate shock waves in the unitary Fermi gas by using the zero-temperature equations of superfluid hydrodynamics. We obtain analytical solutions for the dynamics of a localized perturbation of the uniform gas. These supersonic bright and subsonic dark solutions produce, after a transient time, an extremely large (divergent) density gradient: the shock. We calculate the time of formation of the shock and also simulate the space-time behavior of the waves by solving generalized hydrodynamic equations, which include a reliable dispersive regularization of the shock. We find that the shock …
We report on the experimental measurement of the dispersion relation of the density and spin collective excitation modes in an elongated two-component superfluid of ultracold bosonic atoms. Our parametric spectroscopic technique is based on the external modulation of the transverse confinement frequency, leading to the formation of density and spin Faraday waves. We show that the application of a coherent coupling between the two components reduces the phase symmetry and gives a finite mass to the spin modes.
We propose a pump probe experiment for detecting the d-wave superfluid and d-density wave phases of ultracold Fermions on an optical lattice. The pump consists of periodic modulations of the optical lattice intensity which creates quasiparticle pairs in these systems. The changes in the momentum distribution under the drive can be used to measure quasiparticle dispersion and gap anisotropy. Further, we show that the pattern of peaks and dips in the spin selective density-density correlation function provides a phase sensitive probe of the symmetry of the order parameter in these systems.
We study the properties of propagating polariton wave-packets and their connection to the stability of doubly charged vortices. Wave-packet propagation and related photoluminescence spectra exhibit a rich behaviour dependent on the excitation regime. We show that, because of the non-quadratic polariton dispersion, doubly charged vortices are stable only when initiated in wave-packets propagating at small velocities. Vortices propagating at larger velocities, or those imprinted directly into the polariton optical parametric oscillator (OPO) signal and idler are always unstable to splitting.
Based on random phase approximation (RPA), we numerically calculate dynamical structure factors of a balanced two-dimensional (2D) Fermi superfluid, and discuss their energy, momentum and interaction strength dependence in the 2D BEC-BCS crossover. At a small transferred momentum, a stable Higgs mode is observed in the unitary 2D Fermi superfluid gas where the particle-hole symmetry is not satisfied. Stronger interaction strength will make the visibility of the dispersion of Higgs mode harder to be observed. We also discuss the dimension effect and find that the signal of the Higgs mode in two…
We investigate effects of thermal and quantum fluctuations of the superfluid order parameter in $^1S_{0}$ superfluids in neutron stars. We construct a separable potential to reproduce the $^1S_{0}$ phase shift reconstructed by using the partial wave analysis from nucleon scattering data. We include superfluid fluctuations within a strong-coupling approximation developed by Nozières and Schmitt-Rink and determine self-consistently the superfluid order parameter as well as the chemical potential. We show that the quantum depletion, which gives a fraction of noncondensed neutrons at zero temperat…
We investigate a spinless Fermi gas trapped in a honeycomb optical lattice with attractive nearest-neighbor interactions. At zero temperature, mean-field theory predicts three quantum phase transitions, two being topological. At low interactions, the system is semi-metallic. Increasing the interaction further, the semi-metal destabilizes into a fully gapped superfluid. At larger interactions, a topological transition occurs and this superfluid phase becomes gapless, with Dirac-like dispersion relations. Finally, increasing again the interaction, a second topological transition occurs and the g…
We discuss the unitary Fermi gas made of dilute and ultracold atoms with an infinite s-wave inter-atomic scattering length. First we introduce an efficient Thomas-Fermi-von Weizsacker density functional which describes accurately various static properties of the unitary Fermi gas trapped by an external potential. Then, the sound velocity and the collective frequencies of oscillations in a harmonic trap are derived from extended superfluid hydrodynamic equations which are the Euler-Lagrange equations of a Thomas-Fermi-von Weizsacker action functional. Finally, we show that this amazing Fermi ga…
We study the Higgs amplitude mode in the s-wave superfluid state on the honeycomb lattice inspired by recent cold atom experiments. We consider the attractive Hubbard model and focus on the vicinity of a quantum phase transition between semi-metal and superfluid phases. On either side of the transition, we find collective mode excitations that are stable against decay into quasiparticle-pairs. In the semi-metal phase, the collective modes have "Cooperon" and exciton character. These modes smoothly evolve across the quantum phase transition, and become the Anderson-Bogoliubov mode and the Higgs…
We demonstrate the existence of a collective excitation branch in the pair-breaking continuum of superfluid Fermi gases and BCS superconductors. At zero temperature, we analytically continue the equation on the collective mode energy in Anderson's Random Phase Approximation or Gaussian fluctuations through its branch cut associated with the continuum, and obtain the full complex dispersion relation, including in the strong coupling regime. The branch exists as long as the chemical potential $μ$ is positive and the wave number below $\sqrt{2mμ}/\hbar$ (with m the fermion mass). In the long wave…
