Reconnecting to superfluid turbulence
Physics2008Vol. 1
Citations Over Time
Abstract
By analyzing trajectories of solid hydrogen tracers, we find that the distributions of velocity in decaying quantum turbulence in superfluid 4 He are strongly non-Gaussian with 1=v 3 power-law tails. These features differ from the near-Gaussian statistics of homogenous and isotropic turbulence of classical fluids. We examine the dynamics of many events of reconnection between quantized vortices and show by simple scaling arguments that they produce the observed power-law tails.