Decaying superfluid turbulence near an anomalous non-thermal fixed point
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, with . It is found that, during the same time when this power law in time is seen, the moments of the superfluid velocity circulation around an area of spatial extent exhibit power-law scaling , 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 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 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