Landau damping: Instability mechanism of superfluid Bose gases moving in optical lattices

We investigate Landau damping of Bogoliubov excitations in a dilute Bose gas moving in an optical lattice at finite temperatures. Using a one-dimensional tight-binding model, we explicitly obtain the Landau damping rate, the sign of which determines the stability of the condensate. We find that the sign changes at a certain condensate velocity, which is exactly the same as the critical velocity determined by the Landau criterion of superfluidity. This coincidence of the critical velocities reveals the microscopic mechanism of the Landau instability. This instability mechanism shows that a thermal cloud plays a crucial role in the breakdown of superfluids, since the thermal cloud is a vital source of Landau damping. We also examine the possibility of simultaneous disappearance of all damping processes.