In Chapter 17, we derived the Landau–Khalatnikov two-fluid hydrodynamics which describes the collision-dominated region of a trapped Bose condensate interacting with a thermal cloud. In this chapter, we use these equations to discuss the damping of the hydrodynamic collective modes in a trapped Bose gas at finite temperatures. We derive variational expressions based on these equations for both the frequency and the damping of collective modes. This extends the analysis in Chapter 16 in which a variational approach was developed to calculate the hydrodynamic two-fluid oscillation frequencies in the non-dissipative limit. A novel feature of our treatment is the introduction of frequency-dependent transport coefficients, which produce a natural cutoff eliminating the collisionless region in the low-density tail of the thermal cloud. Our expression for the damping in trapped superfluid Bose gases is a natural generalization of the approach used by Landau and Lifshitz (1959) for uniform classical fluids. This chapter is mainly based on Nikuni and Griffin (2004).

In Chapters 15 and 17, we derived a closed set of two-fluid hydrodynamic equations for a trapped Bose-condensed gas starting from the simplified microscopic model describing the coupled dynamics of the condensate and noncondensate atoms given in Chapter 3. These hydrodynamic two-fluid equations include dissipative terms associated with the shear viscosity, the thermal conductivity and the four second viscosity coefficients. Explicit formulas for these transport coefficients were derived in Section 18.1. Our goal in this chapter is to find a general expression for the damping of the two-fluid modes in terms of these transport coefficients. We emphasize that the damping of hydrodynamic two-fluid oscillations is completely different in nature from the Landau and Beliaev damping of oscillations in the collisionless region which is treated in Chapters 12 and 13.