Decay mechanisms of superflow of Bose-Einstein condensates in ring traps

Abstract

We study the supercurrent decay of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a ring trap combined with a repulsive barrier potential. In recent experiments, Kumar {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. A {\bf 95}, 021602(R) (2017)] have measured the dependence of the decay rate on the temperature and the barrier strength. However, the origin of the decay observed in the experiment remains unclear. We calculate the rate of supercurrent decay due to thermally activated phase slips (TAPS) by using the Kramers formula based on the Gross-Pitaevskii mean-field theory. The resulting decay rate is astronomically small compared to that measured in the experiment, thus excluding the possibility of TAPS as the decay mechanism. Alternatively, we argue that three-body losses can be relevant to the observed decay and predict that one can observe supercurrent decay via TAPS by decreasing the number of atoms.

9 pages, 10 figures

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