Relaxation of superfluid turbulence in highly oblate Bose-Einstein condensates

Understand

We investigate thermal relaxation of superfluid turbulence in a highly oblate Bose-Einstein condensate.

• We generate turbulent flow in the condensate by sweeping the center region of the condensate with a repulsive optical potential.
• The turbulent condensate shows a spatially disordered distribution of quantized vortices and the vortex number of the condensate exhibits nonexponential decay behavior which we attribute to the vortex pair annihilation.
• The vortex-antivortex collisions in the condensate are identified with crescent-shaped, coalesced vortex cores.