Articles

Apparently superluminal superfluids

Kourkoulou, Ioanna; Landry, Michael J.; Nicolis, Alberto; Parmentier, Klaas

We consider the superfluid phase of a specific renormalizable relativistic quantum field theory. We prove that, within the regime of validity of perturbation theory and of the superfluid effective theory, there are consistent and regular vortex solutions where the superfluid’s velocity field as traditionally defined smoothly interpolates between zero and arbitrarily large superluminal values. We show that this solution is free of instabilities and of superluminal excitations. We show that, in contrast, a generic vortex solution for an ordinary fluid does develop an instability if the velocity field becomes superluminal. All this questions the characterization of a superfluid velocity field as the actual velocity of “something”.

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Also Published In

Title
Journal of High Energy Physics
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP01(2024)080

More About This Work

Published Here
October 9, 2024

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Notes

Effective Field Theories, Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking