Superfluidity and relaxation dynamics of a laser-stirred two-dimensional Bose gas

We investigate the superfluid behavior of a two-dimensional (2D) Bose gas of Rb-87 atoms using classical field dynamics. In the experiment by R. Desbuquois et al. [Nat. Phys. 8, 645 (2012)], a 2D quasicondensate in a trap is stirred with a blue-detuned laser beam along a circular path around the trap center. Here, we study this experiment from a theoretical perspective. The heating induced by stirring increases rapidly above a velocity vc, which we define as the critical velocity. We identify the superfluid, the crossover, and the thermal regime by a finite, a sharply decreasing, and a vanishing critical velocity, respectively. We demonstrate that the onset of heating occurs due to the creation of vortex-antivortex pairs. A direct comparison of our numerical results to the experimental ones shows a good agreement, if a systematic shift of the critical phase-space density is included. We relate this shift to the absence of thermal equilibrium between the condensate and the thermal wings, which were used in the experiment to extract the temperature. We expand on this observation by studying the full relaxation dynamics between the condensate and the thermal cloud.