The superfluid fountain effect in a Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We consider a simple experimental setup, based on a harmonic confinement, where a Bose-Einstein condensate and a thermal cloud of weakly interacting alkali atoms are trapped in two different vessels connected by a narrow channel. Using the classical field approximation, as described in J. Phys. B 40, R1 (2007) and optimized in Phys. Rev. A 81, 013629 (2010) for an arbitrary trapping potential, we theoretically investigate the analog of the celebrated superfluid helium fountain effect. We show that this thermo-mechanical effect might indeed be observed in this system. By analyzing the dynamics of the system, we are able to identify the superfluid and normal components of the flow as well as to distinguish the condensate fraction from the superfluid component. We show that the superfluid component can easily flow from the colder vessel to the hotter one while the normal component is practically blocked in the latter.

13 pages, 11 figures, 3 tables

References in corpus (9)

• Direct Observation of Tunneling and Nonlinear Self-Trapping in a single Bosonic Josephson Junction
• Observation of persistent flow of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a toroidal trap
• Observation of dynamical instability for a Bose-Einstein condensate in a moving 1D optical lattice
• Conduction of Ultracold Fermions Through a Mesoscopic Channel
• Fragmentation of Bose-Einstein Condensates
• Observation of deviations from ideal gas thermodynamics in a trapped Bose-Einstein condensed gas
• Constructing classical field for a Bose-Einstein condensate in arbitrary trapping potential; quadrupole oscillations at nonzero temperatures
• Superfluidity of the BEC at finite temperature
• Mechanocaloric and Thermomechanical Effects in Bose-Einstein Condensed Systems

Cited by in corpus (11)

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• Direct imaging of a digital-micromirror device for configurable microscopic optical potentials
• Contact resistance and phase slips in mesoscopic superfluid atom transport
• Breakdown of the Wiedemann-Franz law in a unitary Fermi gas
• Peltier cooling of fermionic quantum gases
• Thermoelectric transport and Peltier cooling of cold atomic gases
• Coulomb drag and counterflow Seebeck coefficient in bilayer-graphene double layers
• Interaction-Assisted Reversal of Thermopower with Ultracold Atoms
• Quantized conductance through the quantum evaporation of bosonic atoms
• Bosonic superfluid transport in a quantum point contact
• Spatial distribution of superfluidity and superfluid distillation of Bose liquids