Holographic duality provides a description of strongly coupled quantum systems in terms of weakly coupled gravitational theories in a higher-dimensional space. It is a challenge, however, to quantitatively determine the physical parameters of the quantum systems corresponding to generic holographic theories. Here, we address this problem for the two-dimensional holographic superfluid, known to exhibit strong dissipation. We numerically simulate the motion of a vortex dipole and perform a high-precision matching of the corresponding dynamics resulting from the dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equation. Excellent agreement is found for the vortex core shape and the spatio-temporal trajectories. A further comparison to the Hall-Vinen-Iordanskii equations for point vortices interacting with the superfluid allows us to determine the friction parameters of the holographic superfluid. Our results suggest that holographic vortex dynamics can be applied to experimentally accessible superfluids like strongly coupled ultracold Bose gases or thin helium films with temperatures in the Kelvin range. This would make holographic far-from-equilibrium dynamics and turbulence amenable to experimental tests.
We study the far-from-equilibrium dynamics of a (2+1)-dimensional superfluid at finite temperature and chemical potential using its holographic description in terms of a gravitational system in 3+1 dimensions. Starting from various initial conditions corresponding to ensembles of vortex defects we numerically evolve the system to long times. At intermediate times the system exhibits Kolmogorov scaling the emergence of which depends on the choice of initial conditions. We further observe a universal late-time regime in which the occupation spectrum and different length scales of the superfluid …
Using the holographic model for spontaneous symmetry breaking, we study some properties of the dual superfluid such as the thermodynamic exponents, Joule-Thomson coefficient, compressibility etc. Our focus is on how these properties vary with the scaling dimension and the charge of the operator that undergoes condensation.
We use holography to investigate the dynamics of a vortex-anti-vortex dipole in a strongly coupled superfluid in 2+1 dimensions. The system is evaluated in numerical real-time simulations in order to study the evolution of the vortices as they approach and eventually annihilate each other. A tracking algorithm with sub-plaquette resolution is introduced which permits a high-precision determination of the vortex trajectories. With the increased precision of the trajectories it becomes possible to directly compute the vortex velocities and accelerations. We find that in the holographic superflui…
We begin an investigation of inhomogeneous structures in holographic superfluids. As a first example, we study domain wall like defects in the 3+1 dimensional Einstein-Maxwell-Higgs theory, which was developed as a dual model for a holographic superconductor. In [1], we reported on such "dark solitons" in holographic superfluids. In this work, we present an extensive numerical study of their properties, working in the probe limit. We construct dark solitons for two possible condensing operators, and find that both of them share common features with their standard superfluid counterparts. Howev…
We construct dark soliton solutions in a holographic model of a relativistic superfluid. We study the length scales associated with the condensate and the charge density depletion, and find that the two scales differ by a non-trivial function of the chemical potential. By adjusting the chemical potential, we study the variation of the depletion of charge density at the interface.
We investigate the analytical method in studying the holographic superfluid model which is described by Maxwell field minimally coupling to a charged scalar field in a fixed AdS black hole background. We propose a method that enables us to find exact value of coefficient in the solution and thus obtain higher-order expansion of the associated Landau free energy of the holographic superfluid with flow. We determine the critical value of superfluid velocity at the tricritical point of holographic superfluid and compare it with the numerical value.
Detailed features of solitons in holographic superfluids are discussed. Using solitons as probes, we study the behavior of holographic superfluids by varying the scaling dimension of the condensing operator, and build a comparison to the BEC-BCS comparison phenomena. Further evidence for this analogy is provided by the behavior of solitons' length scales as well as by the superfluid critical velocity.
We construct gray soliton configurations, which move at constant speeds, in holographic superfluids for the first time. Since there should be no dissipation for a moving soliton to exist, we use the simplest holographic superfluid model at zero temperature, considering both the standard and alternative quantizations. For comparison purpose, we first investigate black solitons in the zero temperature holographic superfluids, which are static configurations. Then we focus on the numerical construction of gray solitons under both quantizations, which interpolate between the (static) black soliton…
Superfluids support many different types of sound waves. We investigate the relation between the sound waves in a relativistic and a non-relativistic superfluid by using hydrodynamics to calculate the various sound speeds. Then, using a particular holographic scalar gravity realization of a strongly interacting superfluid, we compute first, second and fourth sound speeds as a function of the temperature. The relativistic low temperature results for second sound differ from Landau's well known prediction for the non-relativistic, incompressible case.
We argue that the chiral conductivities of generic s-wave holographic superfluids, whose broken U(1) symmetry is anomalous, exhibit universal behavior at low temperatures. The universal behavior we argue for is independent of the details of the bulk action and on the emergent geometry deep in the bulk interior at low temperatures. Our results are contrasted against general expectations based on an analysis of the entropy current in superfluids.
We use the matching method to investigate the first-order phase transition in holographic superconductor and superfluid. We first use the simple holographic superconductor model to describe the matching method and mention how to see the first-order phase transition. Next, we study the holographic superconductor with Stückelberg term and see that the analytic results indicate the existence of first-order phase transition. Finally, we study the holographic superfluid and show that the first-order phase transition can be found for some values of parameters. We determine the critical value analyti…
Superfluid turbulence, often referred to as quantum turbulence, is a fascinating phenomenon for which a satisfactory theoretical framework is lacking. Holographic duality provides a systematic new approach to studying quantum turbulence by mapping the dynamics of certain quantum theories onto the dynamics of classical gravity. We use this gravitational description to numerically construct turbulent flows in a holographic superfluid in two spatial dimensions. We find that the superfluid kinetic energy spectrum obeys the Kolmogorov -5/3 scaling law, as it does for turbulent flows in normal fluid…
We study the ratio of the shear viscosity to the entropy density for various holographic superfluids. For the s-wave case, the ratio has the universal value 1/(4pi) as in various holographic models. For the p-wave case, there are two shear viscosity coefficients because of the anisotropic boundary spacetime, and one coefficient has the universal value. For the (p+ip)-wave case, the existing technique is not applicable since there is no tensor mode of metric perturbations which decouples from Yang-Mills perturbations. Our results indicate that the shear viscosity does not show a singular behavi…
We study a holographic model of a relativistic quantum system with a global U(1) symmetry, at non-zero temperature and density. When the temperature falls below a critical value, we find a second-order superfluid phase transition with mean-field critical exponents. In the symmetry-broken phase, we determine the speed of second sound as a function of temperature. As the velocity of the superfluid component relative to the normal component increases, the superfluid transition goes through a tricritical point and becomes first-order.
Within the simplest holographic superfluid model and without any ingredients put by hand, it is shown that vortices can be generated when the angular velocity of rotating superfluids exceeds certain critical values, which can be precisely determined by linear perturbation analyses (quasi-normal modes of the bulk AdS black brane). These vortices appear at the edge of the superfluid system first, and then automatically move into the bulk of the system, where they are eventually stabilized into certain vortex lattices. For the case of 18 vortices generated, we find (at least) five different patte…
We derive the leading dissipative corrections of holographic superfluids at finite temperature and chemical potential by employing our recently developed techniques to study dissipative effects in the hydrodynamic limit of holographic theories. As part of our results, we express the incoherent conductivity, the shear and the three bulk viscosities in terms of thermodynamics and the black hole horizon data of the dual bulk geometries. We use our results to show that all three bulk viscosities exhibit singular behaviour close to the critical point.
We investigate the flow of a strongly coupled anyonic superfluid based on the holographic D3-D7' probe brane model. By analyzing the spectrum of fluctuations, we find the critical superfluid velocity, as a function of the temperature, at which the flow stops being dissipationless when flowing past a barrier. We find that at a larger velocity the flow becomes unstable even in the absence of a barrier.
We construct a slowly varying space-time dependent holographic superfluid and compute its transport coefficients. Our solution is presented as a series expansion in inverse powers of the charge of the order parameter. We find that the shear viscosity associated with the motion of the condensate vanishes. The diffusion coefficient of the superfluid is continuous across the phase transition while its third bulk viscosity is found to diverge at the critical temperature. As was previously shown, the ratio of the shear viscosity of the normal component to the entropy density is 1/(4 pi). As a conse…
Holographic duality provides a first-principles approach to investigate real time processes in quantum many-body systems, in particular at finite temperature and far-from-equilibrium. We use this approach to study the dynamical evolution of vortex number in a two-dimensional (2D) turbulent superfluid through numerically solving its gravity dual. We find that the temporal evolution of the vortex number can be well fit statistically by two-body decay due to the vortex pair annihilation featured relaxation process, thus confirm the previous suspicion based on the experimental data for turbulent s…
We compute fourth sound for superfluids dual to a charged scalar and a gauge field in an AdS_4 background. For holographic superfluids with condensates that have a large scaling dimension (greater than approximately two), we find that fourth sound approaches first sound at low temperatures. For condensates that a have a small scaling dimension it exhibits non-conformal behavior at low temperatures which may be tied to the non-conformal behavior of the order parameter of the superfluid. We show that by introducing an appropriate scalar potential, conformal invariance can be enforced at low temp…
We study anomalous conductivities in Chiral Superfluids in the framework of two different holographic models, by means of Kubo formulae. In addition, we point out the existence of an anomalous transport phenomenon that consists in the presence of a charge density when the superfluid velocity is aligned with a magnetic field. It has been pointed out recently that certain chiral conductivities in holographic superfluids exhibit universal behavior at zero temperature. We show that anomalous conductivities always stabilize at low temperatures in our setup. Even though the particular value they acq…
We construct fully backreacted holographic superfluid flow solutions in a five-dimensional theory that arises as a consistent truncation of low energy type IIB string theory. We construct a black hole with scalar and vector hair in this theory, and study the phase diagram. As expected, the superfluid phase ceases to exist for high enough superfluid velocity, but we show that the phase transition between normal and superfluid phases is always second order. We also analyze the zero temperature limit of these solutions. Interestingly, we find evidence that the emergent IR conformal symmetry of th…
In the probe limit, we numerically construct a holographic p-wave superfluid model in the 4D and 5D AdS black holes coupled to a Maxwell-complex vector field. We find that, for the condensate with the fixed superfluid velocity, the results are similar to the s-wave cases in both 4D and 5D spacetimes. In particular, "The Cave of Winds" and the phase transition always being the second order take place in the 5D case. Moreover, we find the second-first order translating point $\frac{S_y}μ$ increases with the mass squared. Furthermore, for the supercurrent with the fixed temperature, the results a…
We revisit the question of stability of holographic superfluids with finite superfluid velocity. Our method is based on applying the Landau criterion to the Quasinormal Mode (QNM) spectrum. In particular we study the QNMs related to the Goldstone modes of spontaneous symmetry breaking with linear and quadratic dispersions.In the linear case we show that the sound velocity becomes negative for large enough superfluid velocity and that the imaginary part of the quasinormal frequency moves to the upper half plane. Since the instability is strongest at finite wavelength, we take this as an indicat…
Starting with a holographic construction for a fractional quantum Hall state based on the D3-D7' system, we explore alternative quantization conditions for the bulk gauge fields. This gives a description of a quantum Hall state with various filling fractions. For a particular alternative quantization of the bulk gauge fields, we obtain a holographic anyon fluid in a vanishing background magnetic field. We show that this system is a superfluid, exhibiting the relevant gapless excitation.
We complete the analysis of transport phenomena in p-wave superfluids within gauge/gravity duality, using the SU(2) Einstein-Yang-Mills model with backreaction. In particular, we analyze the fluctuation modes of helicity zero in addition to the helicity one and two modes studied earlier. We compute a further transport coefficient, associated to the first normal stress difference, not previously considered in the holographic context. In the unbroken phase this is related to a minimally coupled scalar on the gravity side. Moreover we find transport phenomena related to the thermoelectric and pie…
We analytically study the holographic superfluid phase transition in the AdS soliton background by using the variational method for the Sturm-Liouville eigenvalue problem. By investigating the holographic s-wave and p-wave superfluid models in the probe limit, we observe that the spatial component of the gauge field will hinder the phase transition. Moreover, we note that, different from the AdS black hole spacetime, in the AdS soliton background the holographic superfluid phase transition always belongs to the second order and the critical exponent of the system takes the mean-field value in …
We consider a holographic model of chiral superfluidity whose bulk is Einstein Yang-Mills and compute viscosity and conductivity responses away from the probe limit. We calculate Hall viscosity and analyze its relationship to the superfluid density and the shift. We find that the relationship between these quantities derived from effective field theory at zero temperature persists for all temperatures: for $p\pm ip$ their ratio is equal to $\mp1/2$. At low temperatures the system develops a Lifshitz throat, indicating an anisotropic scaling symmetry in the infrared dynamics.
We investigate a holographic model of superfluid flows with an external repulsive potential. When the strength of the potential is sufficiently weak, we analytically construct two steady superfluid flow solutions. As the strength of the potential is increased, the two solutions merge into a single critical solution at a critical strength, and then disappear above the critical value, as predicted by a saddle-node bifurcation theory. We also analyze the spectral function of fluctuations around the solutions under a certain decoupling approximation.
We study a Maxwell-Proca action in an asymptotically AdS black hole background. When moving the temperature of the black hole, we find rich phase diagrams having, that depend strongly on the dimension of the operator dual to the Proca field . We present different solutions in the bulk that correspond to the holographic dual for $s$, $p$ or $s+p$-wave superfluids. In the last case we observe the onset of a spontaneously induced current.
We study vortex solutions in a holographic model of Herzog, Hartnoll, and Horowitz, with a vanishing external magnetic field on the boundary, as is appropriate for vortices in a superfluid. We study relevant length scales related to the vortices and how the charge density inside the core of the vortex behaves as a function of temperature or chemical potential. We extract the critical superfluid velocity from the vortex solutions, study how it behaves as a function of the temperature, and compare it to earlier studies and to the Landau criterion. We also comment on the possibility of a Berezins…
We construct an analytic solution of the Einstein-SU(2)-Yang-Mills system as the holographic dual of an anisotropic superfluid near its critical point, up to leading corrections in both the inverse Yang-Mills coupling and a symmetry breaking order parameter. We have also calculated the ratio of shear viscosity to entropy density in this background, and shown that the universality of this ratio is lost in the broken symmetry direction. The ratio displays a scaling behavior near the critical point with critical exponent $β=1$, at the leading order in the double expansion.
History-Dependent Mode Selection in a Driven Holographic Superfluid
School of Fundamental Physics and Mathematical Sciences, Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学杭州高等研究院基础物理与数学学院）
In a holographic superfluid disk, when the rotational velocity is large enough, we find a giant vortex will form in the center of the system by merging several single charge vortices at some specific rotational velocity, with a phase stratification phenomenon for the order parameter. The formation of a giant vortex can be explained as there is not enough space for a standard vortex lattice. Keep increasing the rotational velocity the giant vortex will disappear and there will be an appearance of a superfluid ring. In the giant vortex region, the number of vortices measured from winding number …
We explore the phase structure of a holographic toy model of superfluid states in non-relativistic conformal field theories. At low background mass density, we find a familiar second-order transition to a superfluid phase at finite temperature. Increasing the chemical potential for the probe charge density drives this transition strongly first order as the low-temperature superfluid phase merges with a thermodynamically disfavored high-temperature condensed phase. At high background mass density, the system reenters the normal phase as the temperature is lowered further, hinting at a zero-temp…
Annihilation process of a pair of vortices in holographic superfluid is numerically simulated. The process is found to consist of two stages which are amazingly separated by vortex size $2r$. The separation distance $δ(t)$ between vortex and anti-vortex as a function of time is well fitted by $α(t_{0}-t)^{n}$, where the scaling exponent $n=1/2$ for $δ(t)>2r$, and $n=2/5$ for $δ(t)<2r$. Then the approaching velocity and acceleration as functions of time and as functions of separation distance are obtained. Thus the attractive force between vortex and anti-vortex is derived as $f(δ)\propto 1/δ^{…
In this work, we have analytically devised novel vortex solutions in a rotating holographic superfluid. To achieve this result, we have considered a static disc at the AdS boundary and let the superfluid rotate relative to it. This idea has been numerically exploited in [1] where formation of vortices in such a setting was reported. We have found that these vortex solutions are eigenfunctions of angular momentum. We have also shown that vortices with higher winding numbers are associated with higher quantized rotation of the superfluid. We have, then, analysed the equation of motion along bulk…
We study the breaking of an Abelian symmetry close to the horizon of an uncharged rotating Anti-de Sitter black string in 3+1 dimensions. The boundary theory living on R^2 x S^1 has no rotation, but a magnetic field that is aligned with the axis of the black string. This boundary theory decribes non-rotating (2+1)-dimensional holographic superfluids with non-vanishing superfluid velocity. We study these superfluids in the grand canonical ensemble and show that for sufficiently small angular momentum of the dual black string and sufficiently small superfluid velocity the phase transition is 2nd…
We study dissipation in holographic superfluids at finite temperature and zero chemical potential. The zero overlap with the heat current allows us to isolate the physics of the conserved current corresponding to the broken global $U(1)$. By using analytic techniques we write constitutive relations including the first non-trivial dissipative terms. The corresponding transport coefficients are determined in terms of thermodynamic quantities and the black hole horizon data. By analysing their behaviour close to the phase transition we show explicitly the breakdown of the hydrodynamic expansion. …
We construct numerically static vortex solutions in a holographic model of two-band superconductor with an interband Josephson coupling in both the superfluid and superconductor regime. We investigate the effects of the interband coupling on the order parameter of each superconducting band in the vortex solution, and we find that it is different for each of the two bands. We compute also the free energy, critical magnetic field, magnetic penetration length and coherence lengths for the two bands, and we study their dependence on the interband coupling and temperature. Interestingly, we find th…
We have examined holographic renormalization group($RG$) flows of the shear viscosities in anisotropic holographic superfluids via their gravity duals, Einstein-SU(2) Yang-Mills system. In anisotropic phase, below the critical temperature $T_c$, the SO(3) isometry(spatial rotation) in the dual gravity system is broken down to the residual SO(2). The shear viscosities in the symmetry broken directions of the conformal fluids defined on $AdS$ boundary present non-universal values which depend on the chemical potential $μ$ and temperature $T$ of the system and also satisfy non-trivial holographic…
In this note, we have addressed various issues on zero temperature holographic superfluids. First, inspired by our numerical evidence for the equality between the superfluid density and particle density, we provide an elegant analytic proof for this equality by a boost trick. Second, using not only the frequency domain analysis but also the time domain analysis from numerical relativity, we identify the hydrodynamic normal modes and calculate out the sound speed, which is shown to increase with the chemical potential and saturate to the value predicted by the conformal field theory in the larg…
We explore the far from equilibrium response of a holographic superfluid using the AdS/CFT correspondence. We establish the dynamical phase diagram corresponding to quantum quenches of the order parameter source field. We find three distinct regimes of behaviour that are related to the spectrum of black hole quasi-normal modes. These correspond to damped oscillations of the order parameter, and over-damped approaches to the superfluid and normal states. The presence of three regimes, which includes an emergent dynamical temperature scale, is argued to occur more generally in time-reversal inva…
We initiate the investigation of the zero temperature holographic superfluids with two competing orders, where besides the vacuum phase, two one band superfluid phases, the coexistent superfluid phase has also been found in the AdS soliton background for the first time. We construct the complete phase diagram in the $e-μ$ plane by numerics, which is consistent with our qualitative analysis. Furthermore, we calculate the corresponding optical conductivity and sound speed by the linear response theory. The onset of pole of optical conductivity at $ω=0$ indicates that the spontaneous breaking pha…
Within the context of AdS/CFT, the gravity dual of an s-wave superfluid is given by scalar QED on an asymptotically AdS spacetime. While this conclusion is vastly supported by numerical arguments, here we provide an analytical proof that this is indeed the case. Working at zero temperature, we explicitly find the quadratic action for the superfluid phonon at the boundary in an arbitrary number of dimensions and for an arbitrary scalar field potential, recovering the known dispersion relation for conformal first sound.
In the probe limit, we numerically build a holographic $p$-wave superfluid model in the four-dimensional Lifshitz black hole coupled to a Maxwell-complex vector field. We observe the rich phase structure and find that the Lifshitz dynamical exponent $z$ contributes evidently to the effective mass of the matter field and dimension of the gravitational background. Concretely, we obtain the Cave of Winds appeared only in the five-dimensional anti-de Sitter~(AdS) spacetime, and the increasing $z$ hinders not only the condensate but also the appearance of the first-order phase transition. Furthermo…
We construct the holographic p-wave superfluid in Gauss-Bonnet gravity via a Maxwell complex vector field model and investigate the effect of the curvature correction on the superfluid phase transition in the probe limit. We obtain the rich phase structure and find that the higher curvature correction hinders the condensate of the vector field but makes it easier for the appearance of translating point from the second-order transition to the first-order one or for the emergence of the Cave of Winds. Moreover, for the supercurrents versus the superfluid velocity, we observe that our results nea…
Four lectures on holography and the AdS/CFT correspondence applied to condensed matter systems. The first lecture introduces the concept of a quantum phase transition. The second lecture discusses linear response theory and Ward identities. The third lecture presents transport coefficients derived from AdS/CFT that should be applicable in the quantum critical region associated to a quantum phase transition. The fourth lecture builds in the physics of a superconducting or superfluid phase transition to the simple holographic model of the third lecture.
We investigate the holographic p-wave superfluid in the background metric of the AdS soliton with $RF^{2}$ corrections. Two models, namely, the Maxwell complex vector field model and Yang-Mills theory, are studied in the above context by employing the Sturm-Liouville approach as well as the shooting method. When turning on the spatial components of the gauge field, one observes that, in the probe limit, the inclusion of $RF^{2}$ corrections hinders the superfluid phase transition. On the other hand, however, in the absence of the superfluid velocity, it is found that the $RF^2$ corrections lea…
We study transport phenomena in p-wave superfluids in the context of gauge/gravity duality. Due to the spacetime anisotropy of this system, the tensorial structure of the transport coefficients is non-trivial in contrast to the isotropic case. In particular, there is an additional shear mode which leads to a non-universal value of the shear viscosity even in an Einstein gravity setup. In this paper, we present a complete study of the helicity two and helicity one fluctuation modes. In addition to the non-universal shear viscosity, we also investigate the thermoelectric effect, i.e. the mixing …
In this work we analyze the hydrodynamics of a $p-$ wave superfluid on its strongly coupled regime by considering its holographic description. We obtain the poles of the retarded Green function through the computation of the quasi-normal modes of the dual AdS black hole background finding diffusive, pseudo-diffusive and sound modes. For the sound modes we compute the speed of sound and its attenuation as function of the temperature. For the diffusive and pseudo-diffusive modes we find that they acquire a non-zero real part at certain finite momentum.
