Excitation of Collective Modes in a Chiral Superfluid by Thermal Quench

Abstract

Based on time-dependent Ginzburg-Landau field theory we show that rapid cooling through the second-order phase transition into superfluid \Hea\ excites collective modes of newly formed chiral domains, in addition to topological defects that are formed via the Kibble-Zurek mechanism. Simulations of temperature quenches in the presence of Gaussian space-time white noise generate a highly excited inhomogeneous condensate. Large-scale simulations exhibit a complex network of domain walls and vortices. We report results for the excitation of bosonic collective modes by thermal noise as well as nonequilibrium temperature quenches, followed by coarsening dynamics tracked in terms of the Fourier components of the order parameter amplitudes. For thermal states, the spectrum of bosonic excitations is defined by a power spectral density (PSD) for each mode, which is sensitive to the Langevin damping. For weak damping the PSD onsets sharply at the frequency corresponding to the mass of the bosonic mode, then decays as $1/ω$. We also track the dynamics of the order parameter following a temperature quench. We report results for the scaling exponents of Kibble-Zurek freeze-out time and correlation length as a function of quench rate for several damping rates. The dynamical exponent $z$ is shown to transition smoothly from $z=1$ to $z=2$ as the damping is increased, while the correlation length exponent, $ν\approx 1/2$, is independent of damping.