We study numerically the formation of a vortex lattice inside a rotating bucket containing superfluid helium, paying attention to an important feature which is practically unavoidable in all experiments: the microscopic roughness of the bucket's surface. We model this using the Gross-Pitaevskii for a weakly-interacting Bose gas, a model which is idealised when applied to superfluid helium but captures the key physics of the vortex dynamics which we are interested in. We find that the vortex lattice arises from the interaction and reconnections of nucleated U-shaped vortex lines, which merge and align along the axis of rotation. We quantify the effects which the surface roughness and remanent vortex lines play in this process.
We report on the experimental observation of vortex cluster shedding from a moving obstacle in an oblate atomic Bose-Einstein condensate. At low obstacle velocities $v$ above a critical value, vortex clusters consisting of two like-sign vortices are generated to form a regular configuration like a von Kármán street, and as $v$ is increased, the shedding pattern becomes irregular with many different kinds of vortex clusters. In particular, we observe that the Stouhal number associated with the shedding frequency exhibits saturation behavior with increasing $v$. The regular-to-turbulent transiti…
We analyze the motion of quantum vortices in a two-dimensional spinless superfluid within Popov's hydrodynamic description. In the long healing length limit (where a large number of particles are inside the vortex core) the superfluid dynamics is determined by saddle points of Popov's action, which, in particular, allows for weak solutions of the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. We solve the resulting equations of motion for a vortex moving with respect to the superfluid and find the reconstruction of the vortex core to be a non-analytic function of the force applied on the vortex. This response pro…
We use holography to investigate the dynamics of a vortex-anti-vortex dipole in a strongly coupled superfluid in 2+1 dimensions. The system is evaluated in numerical real-time simulations in order to study the evolution of the vortices as they approach and eventually annihilate each other. A tracking algorithm with sub-plaquette resolution is introduced which permits a high-precision determination of the vortex trajectories. With the increased precision of the trajectories it becomes possible to directly compute the vortex velocities and accelerations. We find that in the holographic superflui…
We consider superfluid hydrodynamics of two-dimensional Bose-Einstein condensates. Interpreting the curvature of the macroscopic condensate wavefunction as an effective gravity in such a superfluid universe, we argue for a superfluid equivalence principle---that the gravitational mass of a quantised vortex should be equal to the inertial vortex mass. In this model, gravity and electromagnetism have the same origin and are emergent properties of the superfluid universe, which itself emerges from the underlying collective structure of more elementary particles, such as atoms. The Bose-Einstein c…
Mutual friction and vortex Hall angle in a strongly interacting Fermi superfluid
University of Florence(佛罗伦萨大学);European Laboratory for Nonlinear Spectroscopy (LENS), University of Florence(佛罗伦萨大学非线性光谱学欧洲实验室);Istituto Nazionale di Ottica del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR-INO)(意大利国家研究委员会光学研究所);INFN, Sezione di Firenze(意大利国家核物理研究所佛罗伦萨分部);Laboratoire Kastler Brossel, ENS-Université PSL, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Collège de France(巴黎高等师范学院-巴黎文理研究大学-法国国家科学研究中心-索邦大学-法兰西公学院卡斯勒布罗塞尔实验室);Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Bologna(博洛尼亚大学物理与天文学系);INFN, Sezione di Bologna(意大利国家核物理研究所博洛尼亚分部)
We numerically model experiments in which large-scale vortex rings - bundles of quantized vortex loops - are created in superfluid helium by a piston-cylinder arrangement. We show that the presence of a normal fluid vortex ring together with the quantized vortices is essential to explain the coherence of these large-scale vortex structures at nonzero temperatures, as observed experimentally. Finally we argue that the interaction of superfluid and normal fluid vortex bundles is relevant to recent investigations of superfluid turbulence.
Holographic duality provides a description of strongly coupled quantum systems in terms of weakly coupled gravitational theories in a higher-dimensional space. It is a challenge, however, to quantitatively determine the physical parameters of the quantum systems corresponding to generic holographic theories. Here, we address this problem for the two-dimensional holographic superfluid, known to exhibit strong dissipation. We numerically simulate the motion of a vortex dipole and perform a high-precision matching of the corresponding dynamics resulting from the dissipative Gross-Pitaevskii equat…
We present an accurate and robust numerical method to track quantized vortex lines in a superfluid described by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation. By utilizing the pseudo-vorticity field of the associated complex scalar order parameter of the superfluid, we are able to track the topological defects of the superfluid and reconstruct the vortex lines which correspond to zeros of the field. Throughout, we assume our field is periodic to allow us to make extensive use of the Fourier representation of the field and its derivatives in order to retain spectral accuracy. We present several case studies to…
We study two dimensional superfluid turbulence by employing an effective description valid in the limit where the density of superfluid vortices is parametrically small. At sufficiently low temperatures the effective description yields an inverse cascade with Kolmogorov energy spectrum $E(k) \sim k^{-5/3}$. Denoting the number of vortices as a function of time by $N(t)$, we find that the vortex annihilation rate scales like $\dot N \sim N^{5/3}$ in states with an inverse cascade and $\dot N \sim N^2$ for laminar flow.
Drain vortices are among the most common vortices observed in everyday life, yet their physics is complex due to the competition of vorticity's transport and diffusion, and the presence of viscous layers and a free surface. Recently, it has become possible to study experimentally drain vortices in superfluid liquid helium, a fluid in which the physics is simplified by the absence of viscosity and the quantisation of the circulation. Using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, we make a simple model of the problem which captures the essential physics ingredients, showing that the superfluid drain vort…
Until now it was not a success to identify a universal triggering mechanism for the formation of the observed cyclon-anticyclon vortex asymmetry phenomenon or the corresponding breaking of chiral vortex symmetry in the rotating medium. In this paper the new linear universal instability mechanism of breaking chiral vortex symmetry due to the super threshold medium rotation frequence in the presence of linear Eckman friction is established. A new non stationary solution to the problem of the disc oscillations in fluid in the connection with experiments on the rotating superfluid helium-II has be…
We propose an alternative approach to the dissipative vortex dynamics occurring in a superfluid vortex lattice at finite temperatures. Focusing upon the pseudomomentum of a vortex and its surrounding quasiparticles, we derive an equation of motion which, in spite of yielding the same evolution as the usual one for massless vortices, does not involve the vortex mass. This picture could provide further insights into the controversy about the nature of the vortex mass.
An insight into vortex reconnections in superfluids is presented making use of analytical results and numerical simulations of the Gross--Pitaevskii model. Universal aspects of the reconnection process are investigated by considering different initial vortex configurations and making use of a recently developed tracking algorithm to reconstruct the vortex filaments. We show that during a reconnection event the vortex lines approach and separate always accordingly to the time scaling $ δ\sim t^{1/2} $ with pre-factors that depend on the vortex configuration. We also investigate the behavior of …
Superfluidity is a special state of matter exhibiting macroscopic quantum phenomena and acting like a fluid with zero viscosity. In such a state, superfluid vortices exist as phase singularities of the model equation with unique distributions. This paper presents novel techniques to aid the visual understanding of superfluid vortices based on the state-of-the-art non-linear Klein-Gordon equation, which evolves a complex scalar field, giving rise to special vortex lattice/ring structures with dynamic vortex formation, reconnection, and Kelvin waves, etc. By formulating a numerical model with th…
Measurements of the energy spectrum and of the vortex-density fluctuation spectrum in superfluid turbulence seem to contradict each other. Using a numerical model, we show that at each instance of time the total vortex line density can be decomposed into two parts: one formed by metastable bundles of coherent vortices, and one in which the vortices are randomly oriented. We show that the former is responsible for the observed Kolmogorov energy spectrum, and the latter for the spectrum of the vortex line density fluctuations.
We study the scattering of vortex rings by a superfluid line vortex using the Gross-Pitaevskii equation in a parameter regime where a hydrodynamic description based on a vortex filament approximation is applicable. By using a vortex extraction algorithm, we are able to track the location of the vortex ring as a function of time. Using this, we show that the scattering of the vortex ring in our Gross-Pitaevskii simulations is well captured by the local induction approximation of a vortex filament model for a wide range of impact parameters. The scattering of a vortex ring by a line vortex is ch…
Superfluid turbulence, often referred to as quantum turbulence, is a fascinating phenomenon for which a satisfactory theoretical framework is lacking. Holographic duality provides a systematic new approach to studying quantum turbulence by mapping the dynamics of certain quantum theories onto the dynamics of classical gravity. We use this gravitational description to numerically construct turbulent flows in a holographic superfluid in two spatial dimensions. We find that the superfluid kinetic energy spectrum obeys the Kolmogorov -5/3 scaling law, as it does for turbulent flows in normal fluid…
Turbulence in superfluid helium~II is a tangle of quantized vortex lines which interact via the classical Biot-Savart law. We show that vortex tangles with the same vortex line density will have different energy spectra, depending on the normal fluid which feeds energy into the superfluid component, and identify the spectral signature of two forms of superfluid turbulence: Kolmogorov tangles and Vinen tangles. By decomposing the superfluid velocity field into local and nonlocal contributions, we find that in Vinen tangles the motion of vortex lines depends mainly on the local curvature, wherea…
We present an experimental and theoretical study of the 2D dynamics of electrically charged nanoparticles trapped under a free surface of superfluid helium in a static vertical electric field. We focus on the dynamics of particles driven by the interaction with quantized vortices terminating at the free surface. We identify two types of particle trajectories and the associated vortex structures: vertical linear vortices pinned at the bottom of the container and half-ring vortices travelling along the free surface of the liquid.
We study numerically the process of vortex nucleation at the wake of a moving object in superfluids using a generalized and non-local Gross-Pitaevskii model. The non-local potential is set to reproduce the roton minimum present in the excitation spectrum of superfluid helium. By applying numerically a Newton-Raphson method we determine the bifurcation diagram for different types of non-linearities and object sizes which allow for determining the corresponding critical velocities. In the case of a non-local potential, we observe that for small object sizes the critical velocity is simply determ…
We study the motion of an electron bubble in the zero temperature limit where neither phonons nor rotons provide a significant contribution to the drag exerted on an ion moving within the superfluid. By using the Gross-Clark model, in which a Gross-Pitaevskii equation for the superfluid wavefunction is coupled to a Schrödinger equation for the electron wavefunction, we study how vortex nucleation affects the measured drift velocity of the ion. We use parameters that give realistic values of the ratio of the radius of the bubble with respect to the healing length in superfluid $^4$He at a press…
We discuss a recent experiment in which the spectrum of the vortex line density fluctuations has been measured in superfluid turbulence. The observed frequency dependence of the spectrum, $f^{-5/3}$, disagrees with classical vorticity spectra if, following the literature, the vortex line density is interpreted as a measure of the vorticity or enstrophy. We argue that the disagrement is solved if the vortex line density field is decomposed into a polarised field (which carries most of the energy) and an isotropic field (which is responsible for the spectrum).
We comment on the paper by Van Gorder ["Motion of a helical vortex filament in superfluid ${}^4$He under the extrinsic form of the local induction approximation", Phys. Fluids 25, 085101 (2013)]. We point out that the flow of the normal fluid component parallel to the vortex will often lead into the Donnelly-Glaberson instability, which will cause the amplification of the Kelvin wave. We explain why the comparison to local nonlinear equation is unreasonable, and remark that neglecting the motion in the $x$-direction is not reasonable for a Kelvin wave with an arbitrary wave length and amplitud…
Filamentary regions of high vorticity irregularly form and disappear in the turbulent flows of classical fluids. We report an experimental comparative study of these so-called " coherent structures " in a classical versus quantum fluid, using liquid helium with a superfluid fraction varied from 0% up to 83%. The low pressure core of the vorticity filaments is detected by pressure probes located on the sidewall of a 78-cm-diameter Von Kármán cell driven up to record turbulent intensity (R $λ$ $\sim$ $\sqrt$ Re 10000). The statistics of occurrence, magnitude and relative distribution of the fila…