We present the analysis of a new signature for light dark matter detection with superfluid $^4$He: the emission of three phonons. We show that, in a region of mass below the MeV, the kinematics of this process can offer a way to reconstruct the dark matter interaction vertex, while providing background rejection via coincidence requirements and directionality. We develop all the necessary technology to deal with such an observable, and compute the associated differential distributions.
We consider the scattering of dark matter particles from superfluid liquid $^4$He, which has been proposed as a target for their direct detection. Focusing on dark matter masses below ~1 MeV, we demonstrate from sum-rule arguments the importance of the production of single phonons with energies $ω\lesssim 1$ meV. We show further that the anomalous dispersion of phonons in liquid $^4$He at low pressures [i.e., $d^2ω(q)/dq^2>0$, where $q$ and $ω(q)$ are the phonon momentum and energy] has the important consequence that a single phonon will decay over a relatively short distance into a shower of …
The quasiparticle propagation away from the track of a highly ionizing particle in superfluid helium at low temperatures has previously been shown to exhibit anisotropy. We discuss the mechanism responsible for this behavior and show that it occurs for nuclear scattering by dark matter for recoil energies down to a few keV, and perhaps lower. This makes it possible to extend WIMP searches with interaction cross sections that reach into the neutrino floor in a meaningful energy range.
Recent experiments [1],[2] which measured the spectrum of the Goldstone collective mode of coherently precessing state in 3He-B are discussed using the presentation of the coherent spin precession in terms of the Bose-Einstein condensation of magnons. The mass in the spectrum of the Goldstone boson -- phonon in the superfluid magnon liquid -- is induced by the symmetry breaking field, which is played by the RF magnetic field
We review the effective field theory associated with the superfluid phonons that we use for the study of transport properties in the core of superfluid neutrons stars in their low temperature regime. We then discuss the shear and bulk viscosities together with the thermal conductivity coming from the collisions of superfluid phonons in neutron stars. With regard to shear, bulk, and thermal transport coefficients, the phonon collisional processes are obtained in terms of the equation of state and the superfluid gap. We compare the shear coefficient due to the interaction among superfluid phonon…
We compute the contribution of phonons to the thermal conductivity in the core of superfluid neutron stars. We use effective field theory techniques to extract the phonon scattering rates, written as a function of the equation of state of the system. We also calculate the phonon dispersion law beyond linear order, which depends on the gap of superfluid neutron matter. With all these ingredients, we solve the Boltzmann equation numerically using a variational approach. We find that the thermal conductivity $κ$ is dominated by combined small and large angle binary collisions. As in the color-fla…
It is shown that the standard effective field theory of non-relativistic superfluids, which includes only the leading order action in derivative expansion, is in general inadequate for studying supersonic processes. Namely, for a proper treatment of the latter the phonons with momenta greater than $mc_s$ are relevant at times (with $m$ being the mass of the superfluid constituent and $c_s$ denoting the sound-speed), which lie beyond the regime of validity of the naive effective theory mentioned above. This is demonstrated on a concrete example by recovering the known expression for the frictio…
We compute the contribution of phonons to the shear viscosity $η$ in superfluid neutron stars, assuming neutron pairing in a $^1S_0$ channel. We use a Boltzmann equation amended by a collision term that takes into account the binary collisions of phonons. We use effective field theory techniques to extract the phonon scattering rates, written as a function of the equation of state (EoS) of the system. Our formulation is rather general, and can be used to extract the shear viscosity due to binary collisions of phonons for other superfluids, such as the cold Fermi gas in the unitarity limit. We …
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…
We evaluate the three bulk viscosity coefficients $ζ_1, ζ_2$ and $ζ_3$ in the color-flavor locked (CFL) superfluid phase due to phonons and kaons, which are the lightest modes in that system. We first show that the computation is rather analogous to the computation of the same coefficients in superfluid $^4$He, as due to phonons and rotons. For astrophysical applications, we also find the value of the viscosities when there is a periodic disturbance, and the viscosities also depend on the frequency of the disturbance. In a temperature regime that might be of astrophysical relevance, we find th…
We study the response of a He-4 detector to the interaction of sub-GeV dark matter using an effective field theory for the superfluid. We compute the lifetime of the phonon, which agrees with what known from standard techniques, hence providing an important check of the effective field theory. We then study the process of emission of two phonons, and show how its rate is much more suppressed than the phase space expectations; this is a consequence of the conservation of the current associated to the superfluid symmetries.
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…
We study the shear and bulk viscosity coefficients as well as the thermal conductivity as arising from the collisions among phonons in superfluid neutron stars. We use effective field theory techniques to extract the allowed phonon collisional processes, written as a function of the equation of state and the gap of the system. The shear viscosity due to phonon scattering is compared to calculations of that coming from electron collisions. We also comment on the possible consequences for r-mode damping in superfluid neutron stars. Moreover, we find that phonon collisions give the leading contri…
We write a covariant transport equation for the phonon excitations of a relativistic superfluid valid at small temperatures. The hydrodynamical equations for this system are derived from the effective field theory associated to the superfluid phonons. We describe how to construct the kinetic theory for the phonon quasiparticles using a relativistic generalization of the analogue model of gravity developed by Unruh. This gravity analogy relies on the equivalence between the action of a phonon field moving in a superfluid background with that of a boson propagating in a given curved space-time. …
Single phonon excitations are sensitive probes of light dark matter in the keV-GeV mass window. For anisotropic target materials, the signal depends on the direction of the incoming dark matter wind and exhibits a daily modulation. We discuss in detail the various sources of anisotropy, and carry out a comparative study of 26 crystal targets, focused on sub-MeV dark matter benchmarks. We compute the modulation reach for the most promising targets, corresponding to the cross section where the daily modulation can be observed for a given exposure, which allows us to combine the strength of DM-ph…
We calculate the three bulk viscosity coefficients as arising from the collisions among phonons in superfluid neutron stars. We use effective field theory techniques to extract the allowed phonon collisional processes, written as a function of the equation of state of the system. The solution of the dynamical evolution of the phonon number density allows us to calculate the bulk viscosity coefficients as function of the phonon collisional rate and the phonon dispersion law, which depends on the neutron pairing gap. Our method of computation is rather general, and could be used for different su…
In superfluid dark matter (SFDM), the phonon field plays a double role: It carries the superfluid's energy density and it mediates the MOND-like phonon force. We show that these two roles are in tension with each other on galactic scales: A MOND-like phonon force is in tension with a superfluid in equilibrium and with a significant superfluid energy density. To avoid these tensions, we propose a model where the two roles are split between two different fields. This also allows us to solve a stability problem in a more elegant way than standard SFDM. We argue that the standard estimates for the…
We employ an effective field theory to study the detectability of sub-GeV dark matter through its interaction with the gapless excitations of superfluid helium-4. In a quantum field theory language, the possible interactions between the dark matter and the superfluid phonon are solely dictated by symmetry. We compute the rate for the emission of one and two phonons, and show that these two observables combined allow for a large exclusion region for the dark matter masses. Our approach allows a direct calculation of the differential distributions, even though it is limited only to the region of…
Recently, a new form of dark matter has been suggested to naturally reproduce the empirically successful aspects of Milgrom's law in galaxies. The dark matter particle candidates are axion-like, with masses of order eV and strong self-interactions. They Bose-Einstein condense into a superfluid phase in the central regions of galaxy halos. The superfluid phonon excitations in turn couple to baryons and mediate an additional long-range force. For a suitable choice of the superfluid equation of state, this force can mimic Milgrom's law. In this paper we develop in detail some of the main phenomen…
The phonon contribution to the shear viscosity $η$ in superfluid neutron stars is calculated by assuming neutron pairing in a $^1S_0$ channel. The shear viscosity is obtained by means of variational methods for the solution of the Boltzmann equation amended by a collision term which takes into account the binary collisions of phonons. Effective field theory techniques are used to extract the phonon scattering rates in terms of the equation of state (EoS) of the system. We find that $η\propto 1/T^5$, the proportionality factor depending on the EoS of the system. Our results indicate that the ph…
Superfluid dark matter postulates that the centers of galaxies contain superfluid condensates. An important quantity regarding these superfluids is their chemical potential $ μ$. Here, we discuss two issues related to this chemical potential. First, there is no exactly conserved quantity associated with this chemical potential due to the symmetry-breaking baryon-phonon coupling. Second, $ μ$ is sometimes introduced by shifting the phonon field by $ μ\cdot t $ which -- again due to the symmetry-breaking baryon-phonon coupling -- introduces an explicit time dependence in the Lagrangian. We inves…
We present some results about dissipative processes in fermionic superfluids that are relevant for compact stars. At sufficiently low temperatures the transport properties of a superfluid are dominated by phonons. We report the values of the bulk viscosity, shear viscosity and thermal conductivity of phonons in quark matter at extremely high density and low temperature. Then, we present a new dissipative mechanism that can operate in compact stars and that is named "rocket term". The effect of this dissipative mechanism on superfluid r-mode oscillations is sketched.
We pin down the origin of a peculiar dispersion relation of domain wall fluctuation, the so-called ripplon, in a superfluid-superfluid interface. A ripplon has a dispersion relation $ω\propto k^{3/2}$ due to the nonlocality of the effective Lagrangian, which is mediated by gapless superfluid phonons in the bulk. We point out the analogy to the longitudinal phonon in the two-dimensional Wigner crystal.
Some results about dissipative processes in superfluids are presented. We focus on fermionic superfluidity and restrict our analysis to the contribution of phonons to bulk viscosity, shear viscosity and thermal conductivity. At sufficiently low temperatures phonons give the dominant contribution to the transport coefficients if all the other low energy excitation of the system are gapped. We first consider a system of cold fermionic atoms close to the unitarity limit. Then we turn to the superfluid phase of quark matter that may be realized at high baryonic density.
We compute one of the bulk viscosity coefficients of cold CFL quark matter in the temperature regime where the contribution of mesons, quarks and gluons to transport phenomena is Boltzmann suppressed. In that regime dissipation occurs due to collisions of superfluid phonons, the Goldstone modes associated to the spontaneous breaking of baryon symmetry. We first review the hydrodynamics of relativistic superfluids, and remind that there are at least three bulk viscosity coefficients in these systems. We then compute the bulk viscosity coefficient associated to the normal fluid component of the …
We propose a novel theory of dark matter (DM) superfluidity that matches the successes of the LambdaCDM model on cosmological scales while simultaneously reproducing the MOdified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) phenomenology on galactic scales. The DM and MOND components have a common origin, representing different phases of a single underlying substance. DM consists of axion-like particles with mass of order eV and strong self-interactions. The condensate has a polytropic equation of state P~rho^3 giving rise to a superfluid core within galaxies. Instead of behaving as individual collisionless part…
We show how the relativistic effective field theory for the superfluid phase of helium-4 can replace the standard methods used to compute the production rates of low momentum excitations due to the interaction with an external probe. This is done by studying the scattering problem of a light dark matter particle in the superfluid, and comparing to some existing results. We show that the rate of emission of two phonons, the Goldstone modes of the effective theory, gets strongly suppressed for sub-MeV dark matter particles due to a fine cancellation between two different tree-level diagrams in t…
We compute the coefficients of bulk viscosity for a non-relativistic superfluid corresponding to a fermionic system close to the unitarity limit. We consider the low temperature regime assuming that the transport properties of the system are dominated by phonons. To compute the coefficients of bulk viscosity we use kinetic theory in the relaxation time approximation and the low energy effective field theory of the corresponding system. We show that the three independent bulk viscosity coefficients, $ζ_1, ζ_2, ζ_3$, associated with irreversible flows vanish for phonons with a linear dispersion …
We compute the mean free path and shear viscosity in the color-flavor locked (CFL) phase of dense quark matter at low temperature T, when the contributions of mesons, quarks and gluons to the transport coefficients are Boltzmann suppressed. CFL quark matter displays superfluid properties, and transport phenomena in such cold regime are dominated by phonon-phonon scattering. We study superfluid phonons within thermal field theory and compute the mean free path associated to their most relevant collision processes. Small-angle processes turn out to be more efficient in slowing transport phenomen…
We consider the phonon contribution to the bulk viscosities $ζ_1, ζ_2$ and $ζ_3$ of a cold relativistic superfluid. We assume the low temperature $T$ regime and that the transport properties of the system are dominated by the phonons. We use kinetic theory in the relaxation time approximation and the low energy effective field theory of the corresponding system. The parametric dependence of the bulk viscosity coefficients is fixed once the equation of state is specified, and the phonon dispersion law to cubic order in momentum is known. We first present a general discussion, valid for any supe…
We consider a model of sub-GeV dark matter whose interaction with the Standard Model is mediated by a new vector boson (the dark photon) which couples kinetically to the photon. We describe the possibility of constraining such a model using a superfluid He-4 detector, by means of an effective theory for the description of the superfluid phonon. We find that such a detector could provide bounds that are competitive with other direct detection experiments only for ultralight vector mediator, in agreement with previous studies. As a byproduct we also present, for the first time, the low-energy ef…
We examine in depth a recent proposal to utilize superfluid helium for direct detection of sub-MeV mass dark matter. For sub-keV recoil energies, nuclear scattering events in liquid helium primarily deposit energy into long-lived phonon and roton quasiparticle excitations. If the energy thresholds of the detector can be reduced to the meV scale, then dark matter as light as ~MeV can be reached with ordinary nuclear recoils. If, on the other hand, two or more quasiparticle excitations are directly produced in the dark matter interaction, the kinematics of the scattering allows sensitivity to da…
In these lectures I describe a theory of dark matter superfluidity developed in the last few years. The dark matter particles are axion-like, with masses of order eV. They Bose-Einstein condense into a superfluid phase in the central regions of galaxy halos. The superfluid phonon excitations in turn couple to baryons and mediate a long-range force (beyond Newtonian gravity). For a suitable choice of the superfluid equation of state, this force reproduces the various galactic scaling relations embodied in Milgrom's law. Thus the dark matter and modified gravity phenomena represent different pha…
We propose a unified framework that reconciles the stunning success of MOND on galactic scales with the triumph of the LambdaCDM model on cosmological scales. This is achieved through the physics of superfluidity. Dark matter consists of self-interacting axion-like particles that thermalize and condense to form a superfluid in galaxies, with ~mK critical temperature. The superfluid phonons mediate a MOND acceleration on baryonic matter. Our framework naturally distinguishes between galaxies (where MOND is successful) and galaxy clusters (where MOND is not): dark matter has a higher temperature…
We analyze the effect of restricted geometries on the contribution of Nambu-Goldstone bosons (phonons) to the shear viscosity, $η$, of a superfluid. For illustrative purpose we examine a simplified system consisting of a circular boundary of radius $R$, confining a two-dimensional rarefied gas of phonons. Considering the Maxwell-type conditions, we show that phonons that are not in equilibrium with the boundary and that are not specularly reflected exert a shear stress on the boundary. In this case it is possible to define an effective (ballistic) shear viscosity coefficient $η\propto ρ_{\rm p…
We discuss the friction experienced by the body rotating in superfluid liquid at T=0. The effect is analogous to the amplification of electromagnetic radiation and spontaneous emission by the body or black hole rotating in quantum vacuum, first discussed by Zel'dovich and Starobinsky. The friction is caused by the interaction of the part of the liquid, which is rigidly connected with the rotating body and thus represents the comoving detector, with the "Minkowski" vacuum outside the body. The emission process is the quantum tunneling of quasiparticles from the detector to the ergoregion, where…
