Instabilities in relativistic two-component (super)fluids

Abstract

We study two-fluid systems with nonzero fluid velocities and compute their sound modes, which indicate various instabilities. For the case of two zero-temperature superfluids we employ a microscopic field-theoretical model of two coupled bosonic fields, including an entrainment coupling and a nonentrainment coupling. We analyze the onset of the various instabilities systematically and point out that the dynamical two-stream instability can occur only beyond Landau's critical velocity, i.e., in an already energetically unstable regime. A qualitative difference is found for the case of two normal fluids, where certain transverse modes suffer a two-stream instability in an energetically stable regime if there is entrainment between the fluids. Since we work in a fully relativistic setup, our results are very general and are of potential relevance for (super)fluids in neutron stars and, in the nonrelativistic limit of our results, in the laboratory.