Quantized Superfluid Vortex Rings in the Unitary Fermi Gas

Aurel Bulgac, Michael McNeil Forbes, Michelle M. Kelley, Kenneth J. Roche, and Gabriel Wlazłowski
Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 025301 – Published 16 January 2014
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Abstract

In a recent article, Yefsah et al. [Nature (London) 499, 426 (2013)] report the observation of an unusual excitation in an elongated harmonically trapped unitary Fermi gas. After phase imprinting a domain wall, they observe oscillations almost an order of magnitude slower than predicted by any theory of domain walls which they interpret as a “heavy soliton” of inertial mass some 200 times larger than the free fermion mass or 50 times larger than expected for a domain wall. We present compelling evidence that this “soliton” is instead a quantized vortex ring, by showing that the main aspects of the experiment can be naturally explained within the framework of time-dependent superfluid density functional theories.

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  • Received 20 June 2013

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.025301

© 2014 American Physical Society

Authors & Affiliations

Aurel Bulgac1, Michael McNeil Forbes2,1,3, Michelle M. Kelley4, Kenneth J. Roche5,1, and Gabriel Wlazłowski6,1

  • 1Department of Physics, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1560, USA
  • 2Institute for Nuclear Theory, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195-1550, USA
  • 3Department of Physics and Astronomy, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington 99164-2814, USA
  • 4Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Il 61801-3080, USA
  • 5Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington 99352, USA
  • 6Faculty of Physics, Warsaw University of Technology, Ulica Koszykowa 75, 00-662 Warsaw, Poland

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Issue

Vol. 112, Iss. 2 — 17 January 2014

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