Superfluid turbulence

Carlo Barenghi, the Newcastle University

This lecture is concerned with superfluids: liquid helium, atomic Bose-Einstein condensates and neutron stars. Superfluids are remarkable because they have zero viscosity. This property makes them Nature's best examples of textbooks' Euler perfect fluid. What makes superfluids even more remarkable is that quantum mechanics constrains the rotational motion to thin vortex filaments of fixed circulation and fixed core radius. This is unlike what happens in ordinary classical fluids, whose eddies can be of any size and strength. Since the nonlinear interaction is the same, superfluid turbulence can be thought as the ultimate simplification of classical turbulence. In this lecture I shall review recent experimental and theoretical results, highlighting the similarities and the differences between superfluid turbulence and classical turbulence.

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