Our new paper published as a PRL Editors Suggestion
Counterflow-Induced Inverse Energy Cascade in Three-Dimensional Superfluid Turbulence
Visualisation of the vorticity field with and without counterflow.
Superfluids are characterised by being described by an immiscible mixture of two fluids: a normal fluid, that is viscous and a superfluid with no viscosity. When a superfluid is heated on one side of a channel, the normal fluid carries the heat away, and the superfluid flows in the opposite direction to conserve the mass. Such a situation generates an out-of-equilibrium state where the two fluids have a non-zero mean relative velocity, known as counterflow. In this work, we showed that for very large counterflow, a three-dimensional superfluid abruptly becomes quasi-two-dimensional and displays all the phenomenology of two-dimensional turbulent flows.
The figure above shows a visualisation of the vorticity field for both, the superfluid and the normal components. On the left, there is no counterflow and the system is fully three-dimensional. On the right, a strong counterflow is applied and the system becomes quasi-two-dimensional.
Learn more about this work in the publication below.
Giorgio Krstulovic
Chargé de recherche CNRS.
Head of Fluid and Plasma Turbulence group.
My research interests include classical and quantum turbulence, vortex dynamics and wave turbulence.