Vortex nucleation limited mobility of free electron bubbles in the Gross-Pitaevskii model of a superfluid

We study the motion of an electron bubble in the zero-temperature limit where neither phonons nor rotons provide a significant contribution to the drag exerted on an ion moving within the superfluid. By using the Gross-Clark model, in which a Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the superfluid wave function is coupled to a Schrödinger equation for the electron wave function, we study how vortex nucleation affects the measured drift velocity of the ion. We use parameters that give realistic values of the ratio of the radius of the bubble with respect to the healing length in superfluid ⁴He at a pressure of one bar. By performing fully three-dimensional spatiotemporal simulations of the superfluid coupled to an electron, that is modeled within an adiabatic approximation and moving under the influence of an applied electric field, we are able to recover the key dynamics of the ion-vortex interactions that arise and the subsequent ion-vortex complexes that can form. Using the numerically computed drift velocity of the ion as a function of the applied electric field, we determine the vortex nucleation limited mobility of the ion to recover values in good agreement with measured data.