English

From a complex scalar field to the two-fluid picture of superfluidity

High Energy Physics - Phenomenology 2013-07-26 v3 Other Condensed Matter Nuclear Theory

Abstract

The hydrodynamic description of a superfluid is usually based on a two-fluid picture. We compute the basic properties of the relativistic two-fluid system from the underlying microscopic physics of a relativistic \varphi^4 complex scalar field theory. We work at nonzero but small temperature and weak coupling, and we neglect dissipation. We clarify the relationship between different formulations of the two-fluid model, and how they are parameterized in terms of partly redundant current and momentum 4-vectors. As an application, we compute the velocities of first and second sound at small temperatures and in the presence of a superflow. While our results are of a very general nature, we also comment on their interpretation as a step towards the hydrodynamics of the color-flavor locked state of quark matter, which, in particular in the presence of kaon condensation, appears to be a complicated multi-component fluid.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1212.0670,
  title  = {From a complex scalar field to the two-fluid picture of superfluidity},
  author = {Mark G. Alford and S. Kumar Mallavarapu and Andreas Schmitt and Stephan Stetina},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1212.0670},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

22 + 6 pages, 1 figure; v3: typos in Eqs. (5a) and (84) corrected