Landau Instability and soliton formation

Abstract

Consider at a finite temperature $T$ a superfluid moving with a velocity $v$ relative to the thermal bath or its normal component. From Landau's argument there exists a critical $v_c (T)$ beyond which excitations can be spontaneously generated and the system becomes unstable. Identifying the final state induced by such an instability has been an outstanding open question. Using holographic duality we perform dynamical simulations of evolutions from initial unstable states, and find that the system settles to a homogenous superfluid state with a final velocity below the critical velocity. The dynamical evolution process appears to be highly chaotic, exhibiting transient turbulence. Nevertheless we are able to identify from the simulations a universal physical mechanism for the reduction of superfluid velocity, in terms of spontaneous nucleation of solitons. We also derive a simple analytic formula which relates the final velocity to the number of solitons nucleated during the evolution.