Abstract
Collisions in a beam of unidirectional quantized vortex rings of nearly identical radii R in superfluid 4He in the limit of zero temperature (0.05 K) were studied using time-of-flight spectroscopy. Reconnections between two primary rings result in secondary vortex loops of both smaller and larger radii. Discrete steps in the distribution of flight times, due to the limits on the earliest possible arrival times of secondary loops created after either one or two consecutive reconnections, are observed. The density of primary rings was found to be capped at the value 500 cm-2R-1 independent of the injected density. This is due to collisions between rings causing the piling up of many other vortex rings. Both observations are in quantitative agreement with our theory.
Highlights
Turbulence appears in various systems—fluids, plasmas, interstellar matter—with common properties such as the existence of long-lived regions of concentrated vorticity, whose reconnections facilitate the evolution of the flow field and redistribution of the kinetic energy between length scales
Reconnections between two primary rings result in secondary vortex loops of both smaller and larger radii
Reconnections of vortex loops comprising a vortex tangle, i.e., quantum turbulence (QT) [27,28], especially those leading to the emission of vortex rings [29], are an important mechanism of redistributing energy towards smaller length scales in QT [30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40]
Summary
Turbulence appears in various systems—fluids, plasmas, interstellar matter—with common properties such as the existence of long-lived regions of concentrated vorticity, whose reconnections facilitate the evolution of the flow field and redistribution of the kinetic energy between length scales. Reconnections between two primary rings result in secondary vortex loops of both smaller and larger radii.
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