Anisotropic superfluidity in a dipolar Bose gas

A quintessential feature of superfluidity is the ability to support dissipationless flow, for example, when an object moves through a superfluid and experiences no drag. This, however, only occurs when the object is moving below a certain critical velocity; when it exceeds this critical velocity it dissipates energy into excitations of the superfluid, resulting in a net drag force on the object and the breakdown of superfluid flow. In many superfluids, such as dilute Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) of atoms with contact interactions, this critical velocity is simply the speed of sound in the system, where the speed of sound is set by the density and the s-wave scattering length of the atoms. However, for other superfluids, such as liquid 4He, this is not the case. In 4He, the critical velocity is set by a roton mode, corresponding to a peak in the static structure factor of the system at some finite, non-zero momentum, with a characteristic velocity that is considerably less than the speed of sound in the liquid. This feature has been verified experimentally via measurements of ion-drift velocity in the fluid, thereby providing insight into the detailed structure of the system. Interestingly, a roton-like feature was predicted to exist in the dispersion relation of a quasi-two-dimensional (q2D) dipolar BEC (DBEC) [16], or a BEC with dipole-dipole interactions. However, unlike the dispersion of 4He, the disperSion of a DBEC is highly tunable as a function of the condensate density or dipole-dipole interaction (ddi) strength. Additionally, the DBEC is set apart from liquid 4He in that its interactions depend on how the dipoles are oriented in space. Thus, the DBEC provides an ideal system to study the effects that anisotropies have on the bulk properties of a superfluid, such as the critical velocity. Here we consider a DBEC in a quasi-two-dimensional (q2D) geometry and allow for the dipoles to be polarized at a nonzero angle into the plane so that the in-plane interaction is anisotropic. By induding repulsive contact interactions to ensure a stable system, we perform direct numeric simulations of an obstacle moving through the system in directions parallel and perpendicular to the tilt of the dipoles. We observe a distinct anisotropic superfluid response in these cases, both for dissipation into quasipartides and topological excitations (vortices), in the form of an anisotropic critical velocity that is larger in the direction of the dipole tilt than in the perpendicular direction. Interestingly, we find that, while the roton displays an anisotropic character, the speed of sound in the systrm is isotropic. Thus, we characterize the DBEC as an fmisotropic superfluid while illuminating the crucial role that the roton plays in this anisotropic behavior.