Critical dynamics of superfluids

A bstract We use standard techniques of hydrodynamics to construct a relativistic effective field theory for the low energy dynamics of nearly critical superfluids. In an appropriate non-relativistic limit, our theory predicts an additional coefficient when compared and contrasted to earlier work of Khalatnikov and Lebedev. In addition, we provide an alternative derivation of the same effective theory, using the Keldysh-Schwinger framework for non-equilibrium systems. Finally, we comment on the comparison with the results of an appropriate holographic computation presented in a companion paper. This provides further evidence in support of the theory we propose and confirms the existence of the extra coefficient we identified.