Superfluid two-stream instability in a microscopic model

Abstract

The superflow in a superfluid is bounded from above by Landau's critical velocity. Within a microscopic bosonic model, I show that below this critical velocity there is a dynamical instability that manifests itself in an imaginary sound velocity and that is reminiscent of the two-stream instability in electromagnetic plasmas. I compute the onset of this instability and its full angular structure in a relativistic, uniform superfluid for all temperatures. At weak coupling, the instability only operates in a very small region in the phase diagram of temperature and superflow. Varying the coupling of the model suggests that the effect is more prominent at strong coupling and thus could be important for superfluids in compact stars and in the laboratory.

14 pages, 9 figures, v2: small modifications in the text, version to appear in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (4)

• Color superconductivity in dense quark matter
• Pion and Kaon Condensation at Finite Temperature and Density
• Renormalisability of the 2PI-Hartree approximation of multicomponent scalar models in the broken symmetry phase
• Critical temperature for kaon condensation in color-flavor locked quark matter

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Instabilities in relativistic two-component (super)fluids
• Thermodynamic origin of the Landau instability of superfluids
• Spontaneous current in an holographic s+p superfluid
• Renormalization of the 2PI-Hartree approximation in a broken phase with nonzero superflow
• Counterflow and coflow instabilities in miscible binary superfluids
• Two-Stream Instability and Bernstein-Greene-Kruskal Mode Formation in Coulomb One Component Plasma
• Multicomponent Superfluids and Superconductors in Dense Nuclear and Quark Matter