Dissipative shock waves generated by a quantum-mechanical piston

Maren E. Mossman, Mark A. Hoefer (), Keith Julien, P. G. Kevrekidis and P. Engels ()
Additional contact information
Maren E. Mossman: Washington State University
Mark A. Hoefer: University of Colorado
Keith Julien: University of Colorado
P. G. Kevrekidis: University of Massachusetts
P. Engels: Washington State University

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract The piston shock problem is a prototypical example of strongly nonlinear fluid flow that enables the experimental exploration of fluid dynamics in extreme regimes. Here we investigate this problem for a nominally dissipationless, superfluid Bose-Einstein condensate and observe rich dynamics including the formation of a plateau region, a non-expanding shock front, and rarefaction waves. Many aspects of the observed dynamics follow predictions of classical dissipative—rather than superfluid dispersive—shock theory. The emergence of dissipative-like dynamics is attributed to the decay of large amplitude excitations at the shock front into turbulent vortex excitations, which allow us to invoke an eddy viscosity hypothesis. Our experimental observations are accompanied by numerical simulations of the mean-field, Gross-Pitaevskii equation that exhibit quantitative agreement with no fitting parameters. This work provides an avenue for the investigation of quantum shock waves and turbulence in channel geometries, which are currently the focus of intense research efforts.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-07147-4 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-07147-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-07147-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().