Sticking transition in a minimal model for the collisions of active particles in quantum fluids
Vishwanath Shukla  1@  , Marc Brachet  2@  , Rahul Pandit  3, *@  
1 : Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS Lyon  (Phys-ENS)  -  Website
CNRS : UMR5672, École Normale Supérieure (ENS) - Lyon
46 allée d'Italie 69007 Lyon -  France
2 : Laboratoire de Physique Statistique de l'ENS  (LPS)  -  Website
CNRS : UMR8550, Université Pierre et Marie Curie (UPMC) - Paris VI, Université Paris VII - Paris Diderot, École normale supérieure [ENS] - Paris
3 : Centre for Condensed Matter Theory, Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science  (IISc)  -  Website
Bangalore 560012, India -  India
* : Corresponding author

Particles of low velocity, traveling without dissipation in a superfluid, can interact and emit sound when they collide. We propose a minimal model in which the equations of motion of the particles, including a short-range repulsive force, are self-consistently coupled with the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We show that this model generates naturally an effective superfluid-mediated attractive interaction between the particles; and we study numerically the collisional dynamics of particles as a function of their incident kinetic energy and the length scale of the repulsive force. We find a transition from almost elastic to completely inelastic (sticking) collisions as the parameters are tuned. We find that aggregation and clustering result from this sticking transition in multiparticle systems.


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