Critical velocity, vortex shedding, and drag in a unitary Fermi superfluid

We study the real-time motion of a microscopic object in a cold Fermi gas at unitary conditions by using an extended Thomas-Fermi density functional approach. We find that the spontaneous creation of singly quantized vortex-antivortex pairs occurs as a critical velocity is exceeded, which leads to a drag between the moving object and the Fermi gas. The resulting force is linear in the velocity for subsonic motion and becomes quadratic for supersonic motion. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.87.013637