English

Apparently superluminal superfluids

High Energy Physics - Theory 2023-05-22 v1

Abstract

We consider the superfluid phase of a specific renormalizable relativistic quantum field theory. We prove that, within the regime of validity of perturbation theory and of the superfluid effective theory, there are consistent and regular vortex solutions where the superfluid's velocity field as traditionally defined smoothly interpolates between zero and arbitrarily large superluminal values. We show that this solution is free of instabilities and of superluminal excitations. We show that, in contrast, a generic vortex solution for an ordinary fluid does develop an instability if the velocity field becomes superluminal. All this questions the characterization of a superfluid velocity field as the actual velocity of ``something".

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.11226,
  title  = {Apparently superluminal superfluids},
  author = {Ioanna Kourkoulou and Michael J. Landry and Alberto Nicolis and Klaas Parmentier},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.11226},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

26 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:38:35.836Z