Landau Phonon-Roton Theory Revisited for Superfluid ^{4}He and Fermi Gases

Phys Rev Lett. 2017 Dec 29;119(26):260402. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.119.260402. Epub 2017 Dec 26.

Abstract

Liquid helium and spin-1/2 cold-atom Fermi gases both exhibit in their superfluid phase two distinct types of excitations, gapless phonons and gapped rotons or fermionic pair-breaking excitations. In the long wavelength limit, revising and extending the theory of Landau and Khalatnikov initially developed for helium [Zh. Exp. Teor. Fiz. 19, 637 (1949)], we obtain universal expressions for three- and four-body couplings among these two types of excitations. We calculate the corresponding phonon damping rates at low temperature and compare them to those of a pure phononic origin in high-pressure liquid helium and in strongly interacting Fermi gases, paving the way to experimental observations.