Point Vortex Model Research Articles

Density Waves of Vortex Fluids on a Sphere

Abstract We aim to find one highly nontrivial example of the solutions to the vortex fluid dynamical equation on the unit sphere (S^2) and compare it with the numerical simulation. Since the rigid rotating steady solution for vortex fluids on S^2 is
already known to us, we consider the perturbations above it. After decomposing the perturbation of the vortex number density and vortex charge density into spherical harmonics, we find that the perturbations are propagating waves. To
be precise, the velocities for different single-mode vortex number density waves are all the same, while the velocities for single-mode vortex charge density waves depend on the degree of the spherical harmonics l, which is a signal of the existence of dispersion. Meanwhile, we find that there is a beat phenomenon for the positive (or negative) vortex density wave. Numerical simulation based on the canonical equations for point vortex model agrees perfectly with our theoretical calculations.

Suppression of the superfluid Kelvin-Helmholtz instability due to massive vortex cores, friction and confinement

We characterize the dynamical instability responsible for the breakdown of regular rows and necklaces of quantized vortices that appear at the interface between two superfluids in relative motion. Making use of a generalized point-vortex model, we identify several mechanisms leading to the suppression of this instability. They include a non-zero mass of the vortex cores, dissipative processes resulting from the interaction between the vortices and the excitations of the superfluid, and the proximity of the vortex array to the sample boundaries. We show that massive vortex cores not only have a mitigating effect on the dynamical instability, but also change the associated scaling law and affect the direction along which it develops. The predictions of our massive and dissipative point-vortex model are eventually compared against recent experimental measurements of the maximum instability growth rate relevant to vortex necklaces in a cold-atom platform.

Gaussian Fluctuations for Interacting Particle Systems with Singular Kernels

We consider the asymptotic behaviour of the fluctuations for the empirical measures of interacting particle systems with singular kernels. We prove that the sequence of fluctuation processes converges in distribution to a generalized Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. Our result considerably extends classical results to singular kernels, including the Biot–Savart law. The result applies to the point vortex model approximating the 2D incompressible Navier–Stokes equation and the 2D Euler equation. We also obtain Gaussianity and optimal regularity of the limiting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process. The method relies on the martingale approach and the Donsker–Varadhan variational formula, which transfers the uniform estimate to some exponential integrals. Estimation of those exponential integrals follows by cancellations and combinatorics techniques and is of the type of the large deviation principle.

Experimental evaluation of phase and velocity control for a cyclorotor wave energy converter

The research presented in the paper is dedicated to the analysis of the 3D experimental testing results of a 1:20 scale prototype LiftWEC cyclorotor wave energy converter (WEC). The scaled prototype was built and tested in the Hydraulic and Offshore Engineering wave Tank (HOET) by Ecole Centrale Nantes (ECN) in 2022. The analysis is conducted using the analytical control-oriented point-vortex model. The presented research covers a range of tests, with particular focus on cases where positive mechanical power generation has been recorded. The analysis of such cases is important, in highlighting the conditions needed for optimum energy conversion, for future development of cyclorotor WEC technology. The study also reviews the results of tests where the rotor rotational speed is varied within each period of monochromatic waves. This is the first experimental test of such a control strategy for cyclorotor WECs.

On asymmetric vortex pair interactions in shear

This study examines the two-dimensional interaction of two unequal co-rotating viscous vortices in uniform background shear. Numerical simulations are performed for vortex pairs having various circulation ratios $\varLambda _0 = \varGamma _{1,0}/\varGamma _{2,0} = (\omega _{1,0}/\omega _{2,0})(a^2_{1,0}/a^2_{2,0}) \leqslant 1$ , corresponding to different initial characteristic radii $a_{i,0}$ and peak vorticities $\omega _{i,0}$ of each vortex $i=1,2$ , in shears of various strengths $\zeta _0 = \omega _S/\omega _{2,0}$ , where $\omega _S$ is the constant vorticity of the shear. Two primary flow regimes are observed: separations ( $\zeta _0 < \zeta _{sep} < 0$ ), in which the vortices move apart continuously, and henditions ( $\zeta _0 > \zeta _{sep}$ ), in which the interaction results in a single vortex (where $\zeta _{sep}$ is the adverse shear strength beyond which separation occurs). Vortex motion and values of $\zeta _{sep}(\varLambda _0)$ are well-predicted by a point-vortex model for unequal vortices. In vortex-dominated henditions, shear varies the peak–peak distance $b$ , and vortex deformation. The main convective interaction begins when core detrainment of one vortex is established, and proceeds similarly to the no-shear ( $\zeta _0 = 0$ ) case: merger occurs if the second vortex also detrains, engendering mutual entrainment; otherwise straining out occurs. Detrainment requires persistence of straining of both sufficient magnitude, as indicated by relative straining above a consistent critical value, $(S/\omega )_i > (S/\omega )_{cr}$ , where $S$ is the strain rate magnitude at the vorticity peak, and conducive direction. Hendition outcomes are assessed in terms of an enhancement factor $\varepsilon \equiv \varGamma _{end}/\varGamma _{2,start}$ . Although $\varepsilon$ generally varies with $\zeta _0$ , $(a^2_{1,0} /a^2_{2,0} )$ and $(\omega _{1,0}/\omega _{2,0})$ in a complicated manner, this variation is well-characterized by the pair's starting enstrophy ratio, $Z_2/Z_1$ . Within a transition region between merger and straining out (approximately $1.65 < Z_2/Z_1 < 1.9$ ), shear of either sense may increase $\varepsilon$ .

Massive superfluid vortices and vortex necklaces on a planar annulus

We study a superfluid in a planar annulus hosting vortices with massive cores. An analytical point-vortex model shows that the massive vortices may perform radial oscillations on top of the usual uniform precession of their massless counterpart. Beyond a critical vortex mass, this oscillatory motion becomes unstable and the vortices are driven towards one of the edges. The analogy with the motion of a charged particle in a static electromagnetic field leads to the development of a plasma orbit theory that provides a description of the trajectories which remains accurate even beyond the regime of small radial oscillations. These results are confirmed by the numerical solution of coupled two-component Gross-Pitaevskii equations. The analysis is then extended to a necklace of vortices symmetrically arranged within the annulus.

Relative dynamics of quantum vortices and massive cores in binary BECs

We study the motion of superfluid vortices with filled massive cores. Previous point-vortex models already pointed out the impact of the core mass on the vortex dynamical properties, but relied on an assumption that is questionable in many physical systems where the immiscibility condition is barely satisfied: the fact that the massive core always lays at the very bottom of the effective confining potential constituted by the hosting vortex. Here, we relax this assumption and present a new point-vortex model where quantum vortices are harmonically coupled to their massive cores. We thoroughly explore the new dynamical regimes offered by this improved model; we then show that the functional dependence of the system normal modes on the microscopic parameters can be correctly interpreted only within this new generalized framework. Our predictions are benchmarked against the numerical simulations of coupled Gross–Pitaevskii equations for a realistic mixture of atomic Bose–Einstein condensates.

Rossby–Haurwitz Wave in a Rotating Bubble-Shaped Bose–Einstein Condensate

A Rossby–Haurwitz (RH) wave is an excitation mode of a fluid on a rotating spherical surface, which propagates westward in the rotating frame of reference. Motivated by the recent realization of the shell-shaped Bose–Einstein condensate in microgravity, we investigate the RH wave in a superfluid rotating on a spherical-surface geometry. We employ the point-vortex model and the three-dimensional Gross–Pitaevskii equation, and numerically demonstrate that RH waves can be observed in the system of a superfluid with quantized vortices.

Validation of a control-oriented point vortex model for a cyclorotor-based wave energy device

Recently conducted analytical assessment of the potential performance of cyclorotor wave energy converters (WECs) have shown that such devices offer the best wave absorption behaviour, if energy capture can be optimised through suitable control. Such claims require additional investigation. This article is dedicated to validation of the control-oriented point vortex model of cyclorotor WECs against numerical and experimental assessments conducted by various research groups. The validation is conducted in terms of the traditional metrics for cyclorotor WECs: (a) cancellation of incoming waves; (b) generation of lift and drag forces (c) mechanical power generation.It is shown that the point vortex model generally confirms the previously conducted analytical assessment of device performance. However, accounting for the influence of the hydrofoil induced wakes decreases performance estimates to some extent. It is also shown that, overall, wave cancellation metrics are more optimistic than actual shaft power generation.Analysis of the lift and drag coefficients, which were derived from experimental data, reveal a range of hydrodynamic and mechanic effects which could influence actual device performance. It has been shown that, due to the complexity of hydrodynamic effects, lift and drag coefficients for the control-oriented model should be considered not only as functions of the Reynolds number and angle of attack, but also related to submergence of the foils and direction of their rotation with respect to the free surface. This method allows us to achieve the best validation against experimental results in terms of generation of tangential and radial forces.

Hamiltonian derivation of the point vortex model from the two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

We present a rigorous derivation of the point vortex model starting from the two-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation, from the Hamiltonian perspective, in the limit of well-separated, subsonic vortices on the background of a spatially infinite strong condensate. As a corollary, we calculate to high accuracy the self-energy of an isolated elementary Pitaevskii vortex.

Dynamics of a massive superfluid vortex in rk confining potentials

We study the motion of a superfluid vortex in condensates having different background density profiles, ranging from parabolic to uniform. The resulting effective point-vortex model for a generic power-law potential $\propto r^k$ can be experimentally realized with recent advances in optical-trapping techniques. Our analysis encompasses both empty-core and filled-core vortices. In the latter case, the vortex acquires a mass due to the presence of distinguishable atoms located in its core. The axisymmetry allows us to reduce the coupled dynamical equations of motion to a single radial equation with an effective potential $V_{\rm eff}$. In many cases, $V_{\rm eff}$ has a single minimum, where the vortex precesses uniformly. The dynamics of the vortex and the localized massive core arises from the dependence of the energy on the radial position of the vortex and from the $r^k$ trap potential. We find that a positive vortex with small mass orbits in the positive direction, but the sense of precession can reverse as the core mass increases. Early experiments and theoretical studies on two-component vortices found some qualitatively similar behavior.

Ensemble Equivalence for Mean Field Models and Plurisubharmonicity

We show that entropy is globally concave with respect to energy for a rich class of mean field interactions, including regularizations of the point vortex model in the plane, plasmas and self-gravitating matter in 2D, as well as the higher-dimensional logarithmic interactions appearing in conformal geometry and power laws. The proofs are based on a corresponding “microscopic” concavity result at finite N, shown by leveraging an unexpected link to Kähler geometry and plurisubharmonic functions. Under more restrictive homogeneity assumptions, strict concavity is obtained using a uniqueness result for free energy minimizers, established in a companion paper. The results imply that thermodynamic equivalence of ensembles holds for this class of mean field models. As an application, it is shown that the critical inverse negative temperatures—in the macroscopic as well as the microscopic setting—coincide with the asymptotic slope of the corresponding microcanonical entropies. Along the way, we also extend previous results on the thermodynamic equivalence of ensembles for continuous weakly positive definite interactions, concerning positive temperature states, to the general non-continuous case. In particular, singular situations are exhibited where, somewhat surprisingly, thermodynamic equivalence of ensembles fails at energy levels sufficiently close to the minimum energy level.

A modified point-vortex model for the vortex dynamics in a two-dimensional superfluid Bose gas

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of the vortices in the homogeneous two-dimensional Bose–Einstein condensate by considering the condensate density variation. It is shown that the condensate density variation plays an important role when two vortices are close together. By the time-dependent Lagrangian functional method and the numerical simulation, we study how the interaction strength of the vortices varies with the distance between two vortices with the same or different topological charges, and generalize the results for the vortex pairs to the multi-vortex case. The numerical simulations demonstrate the validity of our theory.

Motion of three geostrophic Bessel vortices

This study investigates the dynamics of geostrophic vortices (described by modified Bessel functions). We focus on the three-vortex case, where the possibility of self-similar motion and general dynamics for arbitrary strengths is studied. It is found that self-similar motions are limited to rigid rotations and self-similar triple collapse is essentially impossible. For a general description, trilinear coordinates are adopted and extended to the model of geostrophic vortices. The similarities and differences with the point-vortex model are emphasized. The physical regions in the phase plane cannot be directly identified, unlike the point-vortex case where the physical regions are identified as conic sections. The boundary of the physical region approaches the vertices of the triangle in trilinear coordinates in geostrophic vortices, while making a tangent with the sides of the triangle in point vortices. For positive values of the three vortex strengths, the boundary of the physical region is a closed concave curve, whereas it is a circle or ellipse in the case of the point vortex. Importantly, we find a new type of the phase trajectory: an open curve not intersecting with the physical region boundary. We also demonstrate the physical motions and trajectories of vortices for several representative cases of vortex strengths from numerical computations.

Dipole dynamics in the point vortex model

At the very heart of turbulent fluid flows are many interacting vortices that produce a chaotic and seemingly unpredictable velocity field. Gaining new insight into the complex motion of vortices and how they can lead to topological changes of flows is of fundamental importance in our strive to understand turbulence. Our aim is form an understanding of vortex interactions by investigating the dynamics of point vortex dipoles interacting with a hierarchy of vortex structures using the idealized point vortex model. Motivated by its close analogy to the dynamics of quantum vortices in Bose–Einstein condensates, we present new results on dipole size evolution, stability properties of vortex clusters, and the role of dipole–cluster interactions in turbulent mixing in 2D quantum turbulence. In particular, we discover a mechanism of rapid cluster disintegration analogous to a time-reversed self-similar vortex collapse solution.

Superfluid vortex multipoles and soliton stripes on a torus

We study the existence, stability, and dynamics of vortex dipole and quadrupole configurations in the nonlinear Schr\"odinger (NLS) equation on the surface of a torus. For this purpose we use, in addition to the full two-dimensional NLS on the torus, a recently derived [Phys. Rev. A 101, 053606 (2021)] reduced point-vortex particle model which is shown to be in excellent agreement with the full NLS evolution. Horizontal, vertical, and diagonal stationary vortex dipoles are identified and continued along the torus aspect ratio and the chemical potential of the solution. Windows of stability for these solutions are identified. We also investigate stationary vortex quadrupole configurations. After eliminating similar solutions induced by invariances and symmetries, we find a total of 16 distinct configurations ranging from horizontal and vertical aligned quadrupoles, to rectangular and rhomboidal quadrupoles, to trapezoidal and irregular quadrupoles. The stability for the least unstable and, potentially, stable quadrapole solutions is monitored both at the NLS and the reduced model levels. Two quadrupole configurations are found to be stable on small windows of the torus aspect ratio and a handful of quadrupoles are found to be very weakly unstable for relatively large parameter windows. Finally, we briefly study the dark soliton stripes and their connection, through a series of bifurcation cascades, with steady state vortex configurations.

Interaction between breaking-induced vortices and near-bed structures. Part 1. Experimental and theoretical investigation

The present work describes the vortex–vortex interactions observed during laboratory experiments, where a single regular water wave is allowed to travel over a discontinuous rigid bed promoting the generation of both near-bed and surface vortices. While near-bed vortices are generated by the flow separation occurring at the bed discontinuity, surface vortices are induced by the wave breaking in conjunction with a breaking-induced jet. A ‘backward breaking’ (previously observed in the case of solitary waves) occurs at the air–water interface downstream of the discontinuity and generates a surface anticlockwise vortex that interacts with the near-bed clockwise vortex. With the vortex–vortex interaction influenced by many physical mechanisms, a point-vortex model, by which vortices evolve under both self-advection (in relation to both free surface and seabed) and mutual interaction, has been implemented to separately investigate the vortex- and wave-induced dynamics. The available data indicate that both self-advection and mutual interaction are the governing mechanisms for the downward motion of the surface vortex, with the effect of the breaking-induced jet being negligible. The same two mechanisms, combined with the mean flow, are responsible for the almost horizontal and oscillating path of the near-bed vortex. The investigation of the vortex paths allow us to group the performed tests into three distinct classes, each characterized by a specific range of wave nonlinearity. The time evolution of the main variables characterizing the vortices (e.g. circulation, kinetic energy, enstrophy, radius) and their maximum values increase with the wave nonlinearity, such dependences being described by synthetic best-fit formulas.

Turbulent Relaxation to Equilibrium in a Two-Dimensional Quantum Vortex Gas

We experimentally study emergence of microcanonical equilibrium states in the turbulent relaxation dynamics of a two-dimensional chiral vortex gas. Same-sign vortices are injected into a quasi-two-dimensional disk-shaped atomic Bose-Einstein condensate using a range of mechanical stirring protocols. The resulting long-time vortex distributions are found to be in excellent agreement with the meanfield Poisson-Boltzmann equation for the system describing the microcanonical ensemble at fixed energy $\cal{H}$ and angular momentum $\cal{M}$. The equilibrium states are characterized by the corresponding thermodynamic variables of inverse temperature $\hat{\beta}$ and rotation frequency $\hat{\omega}$. We are able to realize equilibria spanning the full phase diagram of the vortex gas, including on-axis states near zero-temperature, infinite temperature, and negative absolute temperatures. At sufficiently high energies the system exhibits a symmetry-breaking transition, resulting in an off-axis equilibrium phase at negative absolute temperature that no longer shares the symmetry of the container. We introduce a point-vortex model with phenomenological damping and noise that is able to quantitatively reproduce the equilibration dynamics.

Mean-Field Convergence of Point Vortices to the Incompressible Euler Equation with Vorticity in $$L^\infty $$

We consider the classical point vortex model in the mean-field scaling regime, in which the velocity field experienced by a single point vortex is proportional to the average of the velocity fields generated by the remaining point vortices. We show that if at some time the associated sequence of empirical measures converges in a renormalized $${\dot{H}}^{-1}$$ sense to a probability measure with density $$\omega ^0\in L^\infty ({\mathbb {R}}^2)$$ and having finite energy as the number of point vortices $$N\rightarrow \infty $$ , then the sequence converges in the weak-* topology for measures to the unique solution $$\omega $$ of the 2D incompressible Euler equation with initial datum $$\omega ^0$$ , locally uniformly in time. In contrast to previous results Schochet (Commun Pure Appl Math 49:911–965, 1996), Jabin and Wang (Invent Math 214:523–591, 2018), Serfaty (Duke Math J 169:2887–2935, 2020), our theorem requires no regularity assumptions on the limiting vorticity $$\omega $$ , is at the level of conservation laws for the 2D Euler equation, and provides a quantitative rate of convergence. Our proof is based on a combination of the modulated-energy method of Serfaty (J Am Math Soc 30:713–768, 2017) and a novel mollification argument. We contend that our result is a mean-field convergence analogue of the famous theorem of Yudovich (USSR Comput Math Math Phys 3:1407–1456, 1963) for global well-posedness of 2D Euler with vorticity in the scaling-critical function space $$L^\infty ({\mathbb {R}}^2)$$ .

Vortex collapses for the Euler and Quasi-Geostrophic models

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>This article studies point-vortex models for the Euler and surface quasi-geostrophic equations. In the case of an inviscid fluid with planar motion, the point-vortex model gives account of dynamics where the vorticity profile is sharply concentrated around some points and approximated by Dirac masses. This article contains two main theorems and also smaller propositions with several links between each other. The first main result focuses on the Euler point-vortex model, and under the non-neutral cluster hypothesis we prove a convergence result. The second result is devoted to the generalization of a classical result by Marchioro and Pulvirenti concerning the improbability of collapses and the extension of this result to the quasi-geostrophic case.</p>