Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 29, 2025

An Analog Macroscopic Technique for Studying Molecular Hydrodynamic Processes in Dense Gases and Liquids
Published on: December 4, 2017
Observation of Subdiffusive Dynamic Scaling in a Driven and Disordered Bose Gas
Gevorg Martirosyan1, Christopher J Ho1, Jiří Etrych1
1Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge, J. J. Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, United Kingdom.
Abstract:
We explore the dynamics of a tuneable box-trapped Bose gas under strong periodic forcing in the presence of weak disorder. In absence of interparticle interactions, the interplay of the drive and disorder results in an isotropic nonthermal momentum distribution that shows subdiffusive dynamic scaling, with sublinear energy growth and the universal scaling function captured well by a compressed exponential. We explain that this subdiffusion in momentum space can naturally be understood as a random walk in energy space. We also experimentally show that for increasing interaction strength, the gas behavior smoothly crosses over to wave turbulence characterized by a power-law momentum distribution, which opens new possibilities for systematic studies of the interplay of disorder and interactions in driven quantum systems.
Related Concept Videos
Behavior of Gas Molecules: Molecular Diffusion, Mean Free Path, and Effusion
Distribution of Molecular Speeds
Kinetic Theory of an Ideal Gas
The number of molecules in one mole is called...
Maxwell-Boltzmann Distribution: Problem Solving
This distribution function f(v) is defined by saying that the expected number N (v1,v2) of particles with speeds between v1 and v2 is given by
The de Broglie Wavelength
Real Gases: Effects of Intermolecular Forces and Molecular Volume Deriving Van der Waals Equation

