Decay of a superfluid current of ultra-cold atoms in a toroidal trap

TL;DR

This paper uses numerical simulations to study how superfluid currents in a Bose-Einstein condensate decay in a toroidal trap, highlighting the role of thermal fluctuations and phase slips.

Contribution

It demonstrates that superfluid decay occurs via thermally activated phase slips and shows the critical velocity is lower than the sound speed, contrasting zero-temperature predictions.

Findings

Decay occurs through thermally activated phase slips.

Critical velocity is lower than the local speed of sound.

Decay rate and critical velocity depend strongly on temperature.

Abstract

Using a numerical implementation of the truncated Wigner approximation, we simulate the experiment reported by Ramanathan et al. in Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 130401 (2011), in which a Bose-Einstein condensate is created in a toroidal trap and set into rotation via a phase imprinting technique. A potential barrier is then placed in the trap to study the decay of the superflow. We find that the current decays via thermally activated phase slips, which can also be visualized as vortices crossing the barrier region in the radial direction. Adopting the notion of critical velocity used in the experiment, we determine it to be lower than the local speed of sound at the barrier, in contradiction to the predictions of the zero-temperature Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We map out the superfluid decay rate and critical velocity as a function of temperature and observe a strong dependence. Thermal fluctuations offer a partial explanation of the experimentally observed reduction of the critical velocity from the phonon velocity.