Abstract
Destroying superfluidity is a fundamental process and in fermionic superfluid such as it splits Cooper pairs into thermal excitations, quasiparticles. At the lowest temperatures, a gas of these quasiparticle excitations is tenuous enough for the propagation to be ballistic. We describe here an exploitation of the ballistic quasiparticles as the “photons” to observe the local destruction of superfluid by a mechanical resonator. We use a 5 by 5 pixel quasiparticle camera to image an emergence of quasiparticle excitations and a tangle of quantized vortices accompanying the pair-breaking. The detected quantum tangle is asymmetric around the mechanical resonator and is governed by the stability of vortices on the resonator surface. The vortex distribution shows that a conventional production of a quantum tangle via repetitive emission of vortex rings starts on the top surface of the generator and spreads around whole surface at high velocity when escaping vortex rings get retrapped by the moving resonator.
- Received 6 January 2022
- Revised 15 March 2022
- Accepted 16 March 2022
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.105.174515
©2022 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Viewpoint
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