English

Decaying superfluid turbulence near an anomalous non-thermal fixed point

Quantum Gases 2026-05-29 v3 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We investigate anomalously slow coarsening in a dilute two-dimensional (2d) superfluid closed with respect to particle and energy exchange with the environment. The dynamics is demonstrated to be closely connected to both, a non-thermal fixed point (NTFP) in a far-from-equilibrium quantum system, and to Kraichnan-Kolmogorov turbulence. During a universal dynamical regime associated with an anomalous NTFP, vortex dynamics are understood to be governed by three-vortex collisions that trigger vortex-antivortex annihilation events, leading to a subdiffusive decay of the vortex density and thus growth of the characteristic inter-defect length scale, vtβ\ell_\text{v}\sim t^{\,\beta} with β1/5\beta\approx1/5. It is found that, during the same time when this power law in time is seen, the moments of the superfluid velocity circulation Γ\Gamma around an area of spatial extent rr exhibit power-law scaling Γ2(r)r8/3\Gamma^{2}(r)\sim r^{8/3}, in agreement with Kraichnan-Kolmogorov predictions for an inverse energy cascade in the inertial range, in a driven-open setting. Moreover, in high-order moments, intermittent deviations from linear scaling Γ2p(r)[Γ2(r)]p\Gamma^{2p}(r)\sim [\Gamma^{2}(r)]^{p} are observed that are consistent with bifractal intermittency corrections previously measured in fully developed classical turbulence. These results establish a quantitative link between decaying quantum turbulence in a closed superfluid and universal dynamics near a non-thermal fixed point. Notably, the subdiffusive decay exponent β1/5\beta\approx1/5 deviates significantly from values reported for classical systems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.21285,
  title  = {Decaying superfluid turbulence near an anomalous non-thermal fixed point},
  author = {Niklas Rasch and Thomas Gasenzer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.21285},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 11 figures