Abstract
Particles of low velocity, traveling without dissipation in a superfluid, can interact and emit sound when they collide. We propose a minimal model in which the equations of motion of the particles, including a short-range repulsive force, are self-consistently coupled with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that this model generates naturally an effective superfluid-mediated attractive interaction between the particles; and we study numerically the collisional dynamics of particles as a function of their incident kinetic energy and the length scale of the repulsive force. We find a transition from almost elastic to completely inelastic (sticking) collisions as the parameters are tuned. We find that aggregation and clustering result from this sticking transition in multiparticle systems.
- Received 18 March 2016
- Revised 11 August 2016
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.94.041602
©2016 American Physical Society