We measure superfluid transport of strongly interacting fermionic lithium atoms through a quantum point contact with local, spin-dependent particle loss. We observe that the characteristic non-Ohmic superfluid transport enabled by high-order multiple Andreev reflections transitions into an excess Ohmic current as the dissipation strength exceeds the superfluid gap. We develop a model with mean-field reservoirs connected via tunneling to a dissipative site. Our calculations in the Keldysh formalism reproduce the observed nonequilibrium particle current, yet do not fully explain the observed loss rate or spin current.
We experimentally study a driven-dissipative Josephson junction array, realized with a weakly interacting Bose Einstein condensate residing in a one-dimensional optical lattice. Engineered losses on one site act as a local dissipative process, while tunneling from the neighboring sites constitutes the driving force. We characterize the emerging steady-states of this atomtronic device. With increasing dissipation strength $γ$ the system crosses from a superfluid state, characterized by a coherent Josephson current into the lossy site to a resistive state, characterized by an incoherent hopping …
I calculate the superfluid density of a non-equilibrium steady state condensate of particles with finite lifetime. Despite the absence of a simple Landau critical velocity, a superfluid response survives, but dissipation reduces the superfluid fraction. I also suggest an idea for how the superfluid density of an example of such a system, i.e. microcavity polaritons, might be measured.
Steady states reached in a coherently pumped exciton-polariton superfluid are investigated. As the pump parameter is changed, the translational symmetry of the uniform system is spontaneously broken, and various steady patterns of quantized vortices are formed. This is peculiar to nonequilibrium dissipative systems with continuous pumping.
We investigate dissipation-induced p-wave paired states of fermions in two dimensions and show the existence of spatially separated Majorana zero modes in a phase with vanishing Chern number. We construct an explicit and natural model of a dissipative vortex that traps a single of these modes, and establish its topological origin by mapping the problem to a chiral one-dimensional wire where we observe a non-equilibrium topological phase transition characterized by an abrupt change of a topological invariant (winding number). We show that the existence of a single Majorana zero mode in the vort…
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.
In a recent article, Kwon et al. [Nature (London) {\bf 600}, 64 (2021)] revealed nonuniversal dissipative dynamics of quantum vortices in a fermionic superfluid. The enhancement of the dissipative process is pronounced for the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer interaction regime, and it was suggested that the effect is due to the presence of quasiparticles localized inside the vortex core. We test this hypothesis through numerical simulations with time-dependent density-functional theory: a fully microscopic framework with fermionic degrees of freedom. The results of fully microscopic calculations exp…
We predict a new mechanism to induce collective excitations and a nonequilibrium phase transition of fermionic superfluids via a sudden switch-on of two-body loss, for which we extend the BCS theory to fully incorporate a change in particle number. We find that a sudden switch-on of dissipation induces an amplitude oscillation of the superfluid order parameter accompanied by a chirped phase rotation as a consequence of particle loss. We demonstrate that when dissipation is introduced to one of the two superfluids coupled via a Josephson junction, it gives rise to a nonequilibrium dynamical pha…
Quantum systems out of equilibrium offer the possibility of understanding intriguing and challenging problems in modern physics. Studying transport properties is not only valuable to unveil fundamental properties of quantum matter but it is also an excellent tool for developing new quantum devices which inherently employ quantum-mechanical effects. In this contribution, we present our experimental studies on quantum transport using ultracold Fermi gases of $^6$Li atoms. We realize the analogous of a Josephson junction by bisecting fermionic superfluids by a thin optical barrier. We observe coh…
Observations of macroscopic quantum coherence in driven systems, e.g. polariton condensates, have strongly stimulated experimental as well as theoretical efforts during the last decade. We address the question of whether a driven quantum condensate is a superfluid, allowing for the effects of disorder and its non-equilibrium nature. We predict that for spatial dimensions d<4 the superfluid stiffness vanishes once the condensate exceeds a critical size, and treat in detail the case d=2. Thus a non-equilibrium condensate is not a superfluid in the thermodynamic limit, even for weak disorder, alt…
We study the superfluid to Mott insulator transition of a mixture of heavy bosons and light fermions loaded in an optical lattice. We focus on the effect of the light fermions on the dynamics of the heavy bosons. It is shown that, when the lattice potential is sufficiently deep to confine the bosons to one dimension but allowing the fermions to freely move in three dimensions (i.e. a mixed-dimensionality lattice), the fermions act as an ohmic bath for bosons leading to screening and dissipation effects on the bosons. Using a perturbative renormalization-group analysis, it is shown that the fer…
In this work we establish constraints on the temperature dependence of the shear viscosity $η$ in the superfluid phase of a dilute Fermi gas in the unitary limit. Our results are based on analyzing experiments that measure the aspect ratio of a deformed cloud after release from an optical trap. We discuss how to apply the two-fluid formalism to the unitary gas, and provide a suitable parametrization of the equation of state. We show that in expansion experiments the difference between the normal and superfluid velocities remains small, and can be treated as a perturbation. We find that expansi…
Tan's contact is a quantity that unifies many different properties of a low-temperature gas with short-range interactions, from its momentum distribution to its spatial two-body correlation function. Here, we use a Ramsey interferometric method to realize experimentally the thermodynamic definition of the two-body contact, i.e. the change of the internal energy in a small modification of the scattering length. Our measurements are performed on a uniform two-dimensional Bose gas of $^{87}$Rb atoms across the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless superfluid transition. They connect well to the theoret…
The phenomenon of stable persistent currents is central to the studies of superfluidity in a range of physical systems. While all of the previous theoretical studies of superfluid flows in annular geometries concentrated on conservative systems, here we extend the stability analysis of persistent currents to open-dissipative exciton-polariton superfluids. By considering an exciton-polariton condensate in an optically-induced annular trap, we determine stability conditions for an initially imposed flow with a non-zero orbital angular momentum. We show, theoretically and numerically, that the sy…
We develop a theory to describe the dynamics of a driven-dissipative many-body Fermi system, to pursue our proposal to realize exotic quantum states based on reservoir engineering. Our idea is to design the shape of a Fermi surface so as to have multiple Fermi edges, by properly attaching multiple reservoirs with different chemical potentials to a fermionic system. These emerged edges give rise to additional scattering channels that can destabilize the system into unconventional states, which is exemplified in this work by considering a driven-dissipative attractively interacting Fermi gas. By…
A large ensemble of quantum vortices in a superfluid may itself be treated as a novel kind of fluid that exhibits anomalous hydrodynamics. Here we consider the dynamics of vortex clusters with thermal friction, and present an analytic solution that uncovers a new universality class in the out-of-equilibrium dynamics of dissipative superfluids. We find that the long-time dynamics of the vorticity distribution is an expanding Rankine vortex (i.e.~top-hat distribution) independent of initial conditions. This highlights a fundamentally different decay process to classical fluids, where the Rankine…
Recent advances in experimental techniques allow one to create a quantum point contact between two Fermi superfluids in cold atomic gases with a tunable transmission coefficient. In this Letter we propose that three distinct behaviors of charge transports between two Fermi superfluids can be realized in this single setup, which are the multiple Andreev reflection, the self-trapping and the Josephson oscillation. We investigate the dynamics of atom number difference between two reservoirs for different initial conditions and different transmission coefficients, and present a coherent picture of…
Dissipation is ubiquitous in nature and plays a crucial role in quantum systems such as causing decoherence of quantum states. Recently, much attention has been paid to an intriguing possibility of dissipation as an efficient tool for preparation and manipulation of quantum states. Here we report the realization of successful demonstration of a novel role of dissipation in a quantum phase transition using cold atoms. We realize an engineered dissipative Bose-Hubbard system by introducing a controllable strength of two-body inelastic collision via photo-association for ultracold bosons in a thr…
We present a sequence of driven-dissipative protocols for controlling cold atoms in tilted optical lattices. These experimentally accessible examples are templates that demonstrate how dissipation can be used to manipulate quantum many-body systems. We consider bosonic atoms trapped in a tilted optical lattice, immersed in a superfluid bath, and excited by coherent Raman lasers. With these ingredients, we are able to controllably transport atoms in the lattice and produce self-healing quantum states: a Mott insulator and the topologically ordered spin-1 AKLT state.
Point contacts provide simple connections between macroscopic particle reservoirs. In electric circuits, strong links between metals, semiconductors or superconductors have applications for fundamental condensed-matter physics as well as quantum information processing. However for complex, strongly correlated materials, links have been largely restricted to weak tunnel junctions. Here we study resonantly interacting Fermi gases connected by a tunable, ballistic quantum point contact, finding a non-linear current-bias relation. At low temperature, our observations agree quantitatively with a th…
We have experimentally measured transport of superfluid, bosonic atoms in a mesoscopic system: a small channel connecting two large reservoirs. Starting far from equilibrium (superfluid in a single reservoir), we observe first resistive flow transitioning at a critical current into superflow, characterized by oscillations. We reproduce this full evolution with a simple electronic circuit model. We compare our fitted conductance to two different microscopic phenomenological models. We also show that the oscillations are consistent with LC oscillations as estimated by the kinetic inductance and …
In fermionic superfluids that are charge neutral, Nambu-Goldstone (NG) modes also known as Anderson-Bogoliubov modes emerge as a result of spontaneous symmetry breaking. Here, we discuss DC transport properties of such NG modes through a quantum point contact. We show that contrary to a naive view that enhancement of the phase stiffness may suppress transport of the NG modes, there must be an anomalous contribution that survives at low temperature. This contribution originates from the conversion process between the condensate and NG mode. We find that within the BCS regime the anomalous contr…
We develop a low-energy effective field theory of a two-dimensional bosonic superfluid on the lowest Landau level at zero temperature and identify a Berry term that governs the dynamics of coarse-grained superfluid degrees of freedom. For an infinite vortex crystal we compute how the Berry term affects the low-energy spectrum of soft collective Tkachenko oscillations and non-dissipative Hall responses of the particle number current and stress tensor. This term gives rise to a quadratic in momentum term in the Hall conductivity, but does not generate a non-dissipative Hall viscosity.
We investigate the real-time dynamics of open quantum spin-$1/2$ or hardcore boson systems on a spatial lattice, which are governed by a Markovian quantum master equation. We derive general conditions under which the hierarchy of correlation functions closes such that their time evolution can be computed semi-analytically. Expanding our previous work [Phys. Rev. A 93, 021602 (2016)] we demonstrate the universality of a purely dissipative quantum Markov process that drives the system of spin-$1/2$ particles into a totally symmetric superposition state, corresponding to a Bose-Einstein condensat…
Signatures of quantum transport are expected to quickly vanish as dissipation is introduced in a system. This dissipation can take several forms, including that of particle loss, which has the consequence that the total probability current is not conserved. Here, we study the effect of such losses at a quantum point contact (QPC) for ultracold atoms. Experimentally, dissipation is provided by a near-resonant optical tweezer whose power and detuning control the loss rates for the different internal atomic states as well as their effective Zeeman shifts. We theoretically model this situation by …
We present a microscopic theory of heat and particle transport of an interacting, low temperature Bose-Einstein condensate in a quantum point contact. We show that, in contrast to charged, fermionic superconductors, bosonic systems feature tunneling processes of condensate elements, leading to the presence of odd-order harmonics in the AC Josephson current. A crucial role is played by an anomalous tunneling process where condensate elements are coherently converted into phonon excitations, leading to even-order harmonics in the AC currents as well as a DC contribution. At low bias, we find dis…
We investigate the superfluid properties of two-dimensional driven Bose liquids, such as polariton condensates, using their long-wavelength description in terms of a compact Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation for the phase dynamics. We account for topological defects (vortices) in the phase field through a duality mapping between the compact KPZ equation and a theory of non-linear electrodynamics coupled to charges. Using the dual theory we derive renormalization group equations that describe vortex unbinding in these media. When the non-equilibirum drive is turned off, the KPZ non-linearity λ…
A quantity known as the contact plays a fundamental role in quantum many-body systems with short-range interactions. The determination of the temperature dependence of the contact for the unitary Fermi gas of infinite scattering length has been a major challenge, with different calculations yielding qualitatively different results. Here we use finite-temperature auxiliary-field quantum Monte Carlo (AFMC) methods on the lattice within the canonical ensemble to calculate the temperature dependence of the contact for the homogeneous spin-balanced unitary Fermi gas. We extrapolate to the continuum…
Collective excitations, such as vortex-antivortex and dark solitons, are among the most fascinating effects of macroscopic quantum states. However, 2D dark solitons are unstable and collapse into vortices due to snake instabilities. Making use of the optical bistability in exciton-polariton microcavities, we demonstrate that a pair of dark solitons can be formed in the wake of an obstacle in a polariton flow resonantly supported by a homogeneous laser beam. Unlike the purely dissipative case where the solitons are grey and spatially separate, here the two solitons are fully dark, rapidly align…
In this work, we implement a new experimental configuration which exploits the specific properties of the optical bistability exhibited by the polariton system and we demonstrate the generation of a superfluid turbulent flow in the wake of a potential barrier. The propagation and direction of the turbulent flow are sustained by a support beam on distances an order of magnitude longer than previously reported. This novel technique is a powerful tool for the controlled generation and propagation of quantum turbulences and paves the way to the study of the hydrodynamic of quantum turbulence in dr…
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…
Collectively pair-driven-dissipative bosonic arrays: exotic and self-oscillatory condensates
California Institute of Technology（加州理工学院）；Wilczek Quantum Center, School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学物理与天文学院斐兹克量子中心）；Departament d’Òptica i Optometria i Ciències de la Visió, Universitat de València（瓦伦西亚大学光学、验光与视觉科学系）
We explore the quantum dynamics of a bright matter-wave soliton in a quasi-one-dimensional bosonic superfluid with attractive interactions. Specifically, we focus on the dissipative forces experienced by the soliton due to its interaction with Bogoliubov excitations. Using the collective coordinate approach and the Keldysh formalism, a Langevin equation of motion for the soliton is derived from the first principle. The equation contains a stochastic Langevin force (associated with quantum noise) and a non-local in time dissipative force, which appears due to inelastic scattering of Bogoliubov …
We measure radiofrequency (rf) spectra of the homogeneous unitary Fermi gas at temperatures ranging from the Boltzmann regime through quantum degeneracy and across the superfluid transition. For all temperatures, a single spectral peak is observed. Its position smoothly evolves from the bare atomic resonance in the Boltzmann regime to a frequency corresponding to nearly one Fermi energy at the lowest temperatures. At high temperatures, the peak width reflects the scattering rate of the atoms, while at low temperatures, the width is set by the size of fermion pairs. Above the superfluid transit…
Inspired by the renewed experimental activities on $p$-wave resonantly interacting atomic Fermi gases, we theoretically investigate some experimental observables of such systems at zero temperature in two dimensions, using both mean-field theory and Gaussian pair fluctuation theory. These observables include the two $p$-wave contact parameters and the breathing mode frequency, which can be readily measured in current cold-atom setups with $^{40}$K and $^{6}$Li atoms. We find that the many-body component of the two contact parameters exhibits a pronounced peak slightly above the resonance and c…
We investigate the competition of various exotic superfluid states in a chain of spin-polarized ultracold fermionic atoms with hyperfine spin $F = 3/2$ and s-wave contact interactions. We show that the ground state is an exotic inhomogeneous mixture in which two distinct superfluid phases --- spin-carrying pairs and singlet quartets --- form alternating domains in an extended region of the parameter space.
We study the onset of dissipation in an atomic Josephson junction between Fermi superfluids in the molecular Bose-Einstein condensation limit of strong attraction. Our simulations identify the critical population imbalance and the maximum Josephson current delimiting dissipationless and dissipative transport, in quantitative agreement with recent experiments. We unambiguously link dissipation to vortex ring nucleation and dynamics, demonstrating that quantum phase slips are responsible for the observed resistive current. Our work directly connects microscopic features with macroscopic dissipat…
In the first part of this chapter we analyze the contact intensity $C$, which has been introduced by Tan [Ann. Phys. 323, 2952 (2008)] and appears in several physical observables of the strongly correlated two-component Fermi gas. We calculate the contact $C$ in the full BCS-BEC crossover for a uniform superfluid Fermi gas by using an efficient parametetrization of the ground-state energy. In the case of harmonic confinement, within the Thomas-Fermi approximation, we derive analytical formulas of $C$ in the three relevant limits of the crossover. In the second part of this chapter we discuss t…
We present an experimental study of the high-energy excitation spectra of unitary Fermi gases. Using focussed beam Bragg spectroscopy, we locally probe atoms in the central region of a harmonically trapped cloud where the density is nearly uniform, enabling measurements of the dynamic structure factor for a range of temperatures both below and above the superfluid transition. Applying sum-rules to the measured Bragg spectra, we resolve the characteristic behaviour of the universal contact parameter, ${\cal C}$, across the superfluid transition. We also employ a recent theoretical result for th…
Large three-body losses in a three-component Fermi gas confined in an optical lattice can prevent the occupation of a lattice site by three atoms. This effective constraint not only gives rise to a suppression of actual three-body loss, but stabilises BCS pairing phases by suppressing the formation of trions. We study the effects of the constraint using bosonisation and density matrix renormalisation group techniques (DMRG). We discuss the case of lithium experiments, and study the dissipative dynamics including loss using time-dependent DMRG with quantum trajectories methods.
We study particle and spin transport in a single mode quantum point contact using a charge neutral, quantum degenerate Fermi gas with tunable, attractive interactions. This yields the spin and particle conductance of the point contact as a function of chemical potential or confinement. The measurements cover a regime from weak attraction, where quantized conductance is observed, to the resonantly interacting superfluid. Spin conductance exhibits a broad maximum when varying the chemical potential at moderate interactions, which signals the emergence of Cooper pairing. In contrast, the particle…
