Particles and fields in superfluids: Insights from the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equation

Vishwanath Shukla, Rahul Pandit, and Marc Brachet
Phys. Rev. A 97, 013627 – Published 24 January 2018
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Abstract

We carry out extensive direct numerical simulations to investigate the interaction of active particles and fields in the two-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii superfluid, in both simple and turbulent flows. The particles are active in the sense that they affect the superfluid even as they are affected by it. We tune the mass of the particles, which is an important control parameter. At the one-particle level, we show how light, neutral, and heavy particles move in the superfluid, when a constant external force acts on them; in particular, beyond a critical velocity, at which a vortex-antivortex pair is emitted, particle motion can be periodic or chaotic. We demonstrate that the interaction of a particle with vortices leads to dynamics that depends sensitively on the particle characteristics. We also demonstrate that assemblies of particles and vortices can have rich, and often turbulent, spatiotemporal evolution. In particular, we consider the dynamics of the following illustrative initial configurations: (a) one particle placed in front of a translating vortex-antivortex pair; (b) two particles placed in front of a translating vortex-antivortex pair; (c) a single particle moving in the presence of counter-rotating vortex clusters; (d) four particles in the presence of counter-rotating vortex clusters. We compare our work with earlier studies and examine its implications for recent experimental studies in superfluid helium and Bose-Einstein condensates.

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  • Received 26 October 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.97.013627

©2018 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & OpticalFluid DynamicsNonlinear DynamicsCondensed Matter, Materials & Applied PhysicsStatistical Physics & Thermodynamics

Authors & Affiliations

Vishwanath Shukla1,*, Rahul Pandit2,†, and Marc Brachet3,‡

  • 1Service de Physique de l'État Condensé, Université Paris-Saclay, CEA Saclay, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
  • 2Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India
  • 3Laboratoire de Physique Statistique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure, associé au CNRS et aux Universités Paris VI et VII, 24 Rue Lhomond, 75231 Paris, France

  • *research.vishwanath@gmail.com
  • Also at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre For Advanced Scientific Research, Jakkur, Bangalore, India; rahul@iisc.ac.in
  • brachet@physique.ens.fr

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Issue

Vol. 97, Iss. 1 — January 2018

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