Quantum turbulence in atomic trapped superfluid: an overview of the field and recent results

Michelle A. Moreno-Armijos, Leandro Machado, Arnol Daniel Garcia Orozco +3 more

Vanderlei Salvador Bagnato, E. A. L. Henn, Jorge Amin Seman +6 more

Vyacheslav I. Yukalov

A statistical model is advanced for describing quantum turbulence in a superfluid system with Bose-Einstein condensate. Such a turbulent superfluid can be realized for trapped Bose atoms subject to either an alternating trapping potential or to an alternating magnetic field modulating the atomic scattering length by means of Feshbach resonance. The turbulent system is represented as a continuous mixture of states each of which is characterized by its own vorticity corresponding to a particular vortex.

Makoto Tsubota, M. Kobayashi

Angela White, Carlo F. Barenghi, Nick P. Proukakis +2 more

In a recent experiment Paoletti [Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 154501 (2008)]10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.154501 monitored the motion of tracer particles in turbulent superfluid helium and inferred that the velocity components do not obey the Gaussian statistics observed in ordinary turbulence. Motivated by their experiment, we create a small 3D turbulent state in an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate, compute directly the velocity field, and find similar nonclassical power-law tails. We obtain similar results in 2D trapped and 3D homogeneous condensates, and in classical 2D vortex points systems. This suggests that non-Gaussian turbulent velocity statistics describe a fundamental property of quantum turbulence. We also track the decay of the vortex tangle in the presence of the thermal cloud.

Makoto Tsubota

Quantum turbulence is recently one of the most important topics in low temperature physics. Physics of quantum turbulence and quantized vortices have been studied chiefly in superfluid helium. The realization of atomic Bose-Einstein condensation has allowed us to study quantized vortives in the fascinating systems too. Generally there are two kinds of cooperative phenomena comprised of quantized vortices, from the research history of superfluid helium. Lots of studies in atomic Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) are devoted mainly to the issues of vortex lattices under rotation. However, another important state on quantized vortices, namely quantum turbulence, has been never studied in atomic BECs. In this work, we address for the first time quantum turbulence in atomic BECs theoretically and numerically. After reviewing shortly the recent developments on quantum turbulecne, we propose how to make quantum turbulence in a trapped BEC by combining rotation around two axes, and confirm the Kolmogorov spectra by the Gross-Pitaevskii model.