Mutual Interactions of Phonons, Rotons, and Gravity

Abstract

We introduce an effective point-particle action for generic particles living in a zero-temperature superfluid. This action describes the motion of the particles in the medium at equilibrium as well as their couplings to sound waves and generic fluid flows. While we place the emphasis on elementary excitations such as phonons and rotons, our formalism applies also to macroscopic objects such as vortex rings and rigid bodies interacting with long-wavelength fluid modes. Within our approach, we reproduce phonon decay and phonon-phonon scattering as predicted using a purely field-theoretic description of phonons. We also correct classic results by Landau and Khalatnikov on roton-phonon scattering. Finally, we discuss how phonons and rotons couple to gravity, and show that the former tend to float while the latter tend to sink but with rather peculiar trajectories. Our formalism can be easily extended to include (general) relativistic effects and couplings to additional matter fields. As such, it can be relevant in contexts as diverse as neutron star physics and light dark matter detection.

37 pages

References in corpus (10)

• General coordinate invariance and conformal invariance in nonrelativistic physics: Unitary Fermi gas
• Observation of Roton Mode Population in a Dipolar Quantum Gas
• The quantum mechanics of perfect fluids
• Galileons as Wess-Zumino Terms
• (Re-)Inventing the Relativistic Wheel: Gravity, Cosets, and Spinning Objects
• General coordinate invariance in quantum many-body systems
• Nonlinear realizations of symmetries and unphysical Goldstone bosons
• Roton-Phonon Interactions in Superfluid 4He
• Vortex precession in trapped superfluids from effective field theory
• A multipole-expanded effective field theory for vortex ring-sound interactions

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Static response and Love numbers of Schwarzschild black holes
• Heavy Operators and Hydrodynamic Tails
• The dispersion relation of Landau elementary excitations and the thermodynamic properties of superfluid ${}^4$He
• Sub-GeV Dark Matter in Superfluid He-4: an Effective Theory Approach
• The gravitational mass carried by sound waves
• Hydrodynamic magneto-transport in charge density wave states
• Dark Matter, Dark Photon and Superfluid He-4 from Effective Field Theory
• Directional detection of light dark matter from three-phonon events in superfluid ${}^4$He
• Phonon and Shifton from a Real Modulated Scalar
• On Effective Theory of Superfluid Phonons
• Gapped Goldstones at the cut-off scale: a non-relativistic EFT
• Signatures and Detection Prospects for sub-GeV Dark Matter with Superfluid Helium
• Superfluid Effective Field Theory for Dark Matter Direct Detection
• Boundary effects on classical liquid density fluctuations
• Mesoscopic Collective Dynamics in Liquids and the Dual Model
• A multipole-expanded effective field theory for vortex ring-sound interactions
• Non-equilibrium dynamics in Holography
• Effective Field Theory for Acoustic and Pseudo-Acoustic Phonons in Solids
• Transport properties of superfluid phonons in neutron stars
• Damping of elementary excitations in one-dimensional dipolar Bose gases
• Sound waves move matter
• Random walk of a massive quasiparticle in the phonon gas of an ultralow temperature superfluid
• Quantum matter and gravitation: photons in a waveguide
• Hydrodynamic magneto-transport in holographic charge density wave states