Order from chaos: Observation of large-scale flow from turbulence in a two-dimensional superfluid

Understand

Interacting systems driven far from equilibrium tend to evolve to steady states exhibiting large-scale structure and order.

• In two-dimensional turbulent flow the seemingly random swirling motion of a fluid can evolve towards persistent large-scale vortices.
• Lars Onsager proposed a model based on statistical mechanics of quantized vortices to explain such behavior.
• Here we report the first experimental confirmation of Onsager's model of turbulence.