Fermionic shock waves - dissipative or dispersive?

Abstract

The collision of two clouds of Fermi gas at unitarity (UFG) has been recently observed to lead to shock waves whose regularization mechanism, dissipative or dispersive, is being debated. While classical, dissipative shocks, as in gas dynamics, develop a steep, localized shock front that translates at a well-defined speed, dispersively regularized shocks are distinguished by an expanding region of short wavelength oscillations with two speeds, those of the leading and trailing edges. For typical UFG experimental conditions, the theoretical oscillation length scale is smaller than the resolution of present imaging systems so it is unclear how to determine the shock type from its structure alone. Two experimental methods to determine the appropriate regularization mechanism are proposed: measurement of the shock speed and observation of a one-dimensional collision experiment with sufficiently tight radial confinement.

7 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Quantum transport in ultracold atoms
• Dissipative shock waves generated by a quantum-mechanical piston
• Quantum Shock Waves and Population Inversion in Collisions of Ultracold Atomic Clouds
• What is a quantum shock wave?
• Radiating dispersive shock waves in nonlocal optical media
• Hydrodynamic gauge fixing and higher order hydrodynamic expansion
• Modulation theory and resonant regimes for dispersive shock waves in nematic liquid crystals
• Phase-induced transport in atomic gases: from superfluid to Mott insulator
• Whitham Shocks and Resonant Dispersive Shock Waves Governed by the Higher Order Korteweg-de Vries Equation
• Transition fronts and their universality classes
• Shock Waves in a Superfluid with Higher-Order Dispersion
• Dynamics of shock waves in a superfluid unitary Fermi gas
• Shock waves in colliding Fermi gases at finite temperature
• Shock wave generation and propagation in dissipative and nonlocal nonlinear Rydberg media