Binary superfluids: Low-energy properties and dissipative processes from spontaneous emission of massive phonons

Abstract

We discuss the low-energy properties of binary superfluids with density-dependent interactions. Adding an intra-species coupling that induces an explicit soft symmetry-breaking, we determine the background pressure and we show that the low-energy spectrum consists of a massless Nambu- Goldstone boson and a massive (pseudo) Nambu-Goldstone boson. When the background velocities of the two superfluids are transonic, the system is characterized by two distinct acoustic horizons: the hydrodynamic analogue of the black hole event horizon. The Hawking-like emission occurring at these horizons produces an effective friction on the fluids. We compute the viscosity-to-entropy ratios close to the two acoustic horizons, finding that the emission of pseudo Nambu-Goldstone bosons violates the bound conjectured by Kovtun, Son and Starinet.

20 pages