Abstract. The Donnelly-Glaberson (DG) instability causes the amplification of Kelvin waves on vortex lines in superfluid4 He and 3 He-B at finite temperatures due to mutual friction between vortex lines and the normal fluid component. In this letter, we theoretically show that the DG instability is possible in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates even at T = 0 K without the normal component. The DG instability in atomic condensates can lead to observe the dispersion relation of Kelvin waves, vortex reconnections and quantum turbulence.
IntroductionIt is known that quantized vortices play an important role in the dynamics in superfluid. Kelvin waves, which deform the line into a helix propagating along itself, are a fundamental motion of the vortex lines. Kelvin waves were first discussed in a classical inviscid fluid in the 19th century [1], and recently in superfluid 4 He, 3 He-B [2], and atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) [3,4,5]. These years it is pointed out that the physics of Kelvin waves is indispensable for understanding quantum turbulence [2]. The atomic BECs are useful to study Kelvin waves since we can observe directly them in experiments [4], and enable us to analyze them from the microscopic viewpoint with the Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) and the Bogoliubov-de Gennes (BdG) models [3,5,6]. This is contrast to helium superfluids, where, because vortex core size is of the order of angstrom, it is difficult to detect Kelvin waves experimentally and vortex dynamics is mainly discussed in a phenomenological model [7]. Thus we expect that the study of Kelvin waves in atomic BECs could provide new physics from the microscopic point of view.In this work, we theoretically study the Donnelly-Glaberson (DG) instability [8] in atomic BECs with the GP and the BdG models. We show that the DG instability can occur even at T = 0 K in atomic BECs. The DG instability at T = 0 K can be expressed as superradiance which causes the amplification of excitations in superfluid through the Landau instability [9]. The DG instability in atomic BECs gives the possibility of observing the dispersion relation of Kelvin waves, vortex reconnections and quantum turbulence.