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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Landau instability and soliton formations

Shanquan Lan1,*, Hong Liu2,†, Yu Tian3,4,‡, and Hongbao Zhang5,6,7,§

  • *Contact author: lansq@lingnan.edu.cn
  • †Contact author: hong_liu@mit.edu
  • ‡Contact author: ytian@ucas.ac.cn
  • §Contact author: hongbaozhang@bnu.edu.cn
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Phys. Rev. D 112, L021901 – Published 15 July, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/g8sg-prdf

Abstract

Consider at a finite temperature T a superfluid moving with a velocity v relative to the thermal bath or its normal component. From Landau’s argument there exists a critical vc(T) beyond which excitations can be spontaneously generated, and the system becomes unstable. Identifying the final state induced by such an instability has been an outstanding open question. Using holographic duality we perform dynamical simulations of evolutions from initial unstable states, and find that the system settles to a homogenous superfluid state with a final velocity below the critical velocity. The dynamical evolution process appears to be highly chaotic, exhibiting transient turbulence. Nevertheless we are able to identify from the simulations a universal physical mechanism for the reduction of superfluid velocity, in terms of the spontaneous nucleation of solitons. We also derive a simple analytic formula which relates the final velocity to the number of solitons nucleated during the evolution.

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Phys. Rev. D 112, L021901– Published 15 July, 2025
  • Received 15 October 2020
  • Accepted 20 May 2025
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