Sticking Transition in a Minimal Model for the Collisions of Active Particles in Quantum Fluids
Abstract
Particles of low velocity, travelling without dissipation in a superfluid, can interact and emit sound when they collide. We propose a minimal model in which the equations of motion of the particles, including a short-range repulsive force, are self-consistently coupled with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We use this model to demonstrate the existence of an effective superfluid-mediated attractive interaction between the particles; and we study numerically the collisional dynamics of particles as a function of their incident kinetic energy and the length-scale of the repulsive force. We find a transition from almost elastic to completely inelastic (sticking) collisions as the parameters are tuned. We find that aggregation and clustering result from this sticking transition in multi-particle systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1603.05814,
title = {Sticking Transition in a Minimal Model for the Collisions of Active Particles in Quantum Fluids},
author = {Vishwanath Shukla and Marc Brachet and Rahul Pandit},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.05814},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
3 captioned figures, 5 videos, Supplemental Material at the end of the file and contains links to the videos