Recently Finne et al. found a transition to the turbulent state in rotating superfluid 3He-B which is insensitive to the fluid velocity, but rather controlled by temperature. They reported that at low temperatures a few seed vortices, injected into a vortex-free region, developed through a transient turbulent state to a vortex array. The experimental observations were consistent with the numerical simulation of dynamics of quantized vortices. However, we do not understand well how the seed vortex follows the above scenario and, especially, how the turbulent vortices change to a vortex array. Although the previous numerical simulation was done for a rotating cubic vessel, we study here the vortex dynamics in a rotating cylindrical vessel which is more suitable for the comparison with the experiments. We developed a numerical method for calculating the vortex dynamics in a cylindrical vessel and investigated the vortex dynamics after a vortex seed loop was injected into a vortex-free region. The numerical result shows that the seed vortex becomes unstable, especially near the cylindrical side wall, and develops into turbulent vortices. After that a vortex array appears in the central region, collecting the vortices from the surrounding tangle. PACS numbers: 67.40.Vs, 47.32.Cc, 47.37.+q.
Read full abstract