Experimental Study of a Bose Superfluid ``Battery'' for Atomtronics

The two component model of superfluids describes a thermo-mechanical force in which a thermal gradient across the fluid causes a counter-propagating flow of the normal and superfluid components, with the superfluid current propagating toward the ``hot'' portion of the container and the normal component towards the ``cold.'' We observe the energy and flux of a Bose-condensed gas flowing over a barrier in a hybrid magnetic and optical trap using a high-resolution atom chip projection and in-trap imaging system. We introduce a thermal gradient using asymmetric cooling of the condensed gas and the resulting thermo-mechanical force induces a supercurrent flow over the barrier. We observe, as expected, that the energy of the atoms emerging from the barrier is determined by the barrier height. We show that, like the ``fountain effect'' seen in liquid helium-4, the energy of the emerging atoms can be many times higher than the chemical potential as well as the thermal energy of the condensate. Through these experiments we establish that a reservoir of Bose-condensed atoms combined with a cooling mechanism can serve as a ``battery'' to drive the current in an atomtronic circuit.