Sticking transition in a minimal model for the collisions of active particles in quantum fluids

Abstract

Particles of low velocity, traveling without dissipation in a superfluid, can interact and emit sound when they collide. We propose a minimal model in which the equations of motion of the particles, including a short-range repulsive force, are self-consistently coupled with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that this model generates naturally an effective superfluid-mediated attractive interaction between the particles; and we study numerically the collisional dynamics of particles as a function of their incident kinetic energy and the length scale of the repulsive force. We find a transition from almost elastic to completely inelastic (sticking) collisions as the parameters are tuned. We find that aggregation and clustering result from this sticking transition in multiparticle systems.

Publication
PHYSICAL REVIEW A 94, (2016).
Date
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