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Abstract

It is shown that the standard effective field theory of non-relativistic superfluids, which includes only the leading order action in derivative expansion, is in general inadequate for studying supersonic processes. Namely, for a proper treatment of the latter the phonons with momenta greater than $mc_s$ are relevant at times (with m being the mass of the superfluid constituent and $c_s$ denoting the sound-speed), which lie beyond the regime of validity of the naive effective theory mentioned above. This is demonstrated on a concrete example by recovering the known expression for the friction force as a process of radiating phonons by a supersonic perturber. In particular, when the impurity is heavier than superfluid constituents, it is indeed necessary to extend the non-relativistic effective theory of superfluids to include high-derivative corrections. For the light perturber, however, there is a window of velocities for which high-derivative corrections are irrelevant.