Counterflow and coflow instabilities in miscible binary superfluids
Phys. Rev. A 113, 013305 – Published 5 January, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/g954-ddt7
Abstract
We explore instabilities in binary superfluids with a nonvanishing relative superflow, particularly focusing on counterflow and coflow instabilities. We extend recent results on the thermodynamic origin of finite superflow instabilities in single-component superfluids to binary systems and derive a criterion for the onset of instability through a hydrodynamic analysis, which applies to interacting many-body systems at finite temperature. We find that the onset of these instabilities is signaled by the determinant of the Hessian of the thermal free energy diverging and changing sign. We verify this hydrodynamic prediction in a holographic binary superfluid modeled with gauge-gravity duality, which naturally incorporates strong coupling, finite temperature, and dissipation. We also compare to results obtained using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation for weakly interacting Bose-Einstein condensates and find that the same criterion continues to apply at zero temperature, where it reduces to evaluating derivatives of the supercurrents with respect to the superfluid velocities. We observe that the critical velocities of these instabilities follow a general scaling law related to the interaction strength between superfluid components. Finally, the nonlinear stages of the instabilities are studied by full time evolution using gauge-gravity duality, where vortex annihilation leads to a decrease of superfluid velocity back to a value where the binary superfluid phase is stable.
