Numerical study of decay of vortex tangles in superfluid helium at zero temperature

摘要

We submit the results of the numerical experiment on the decay of the quantum turbulence in the absence of the normal component of the superfluid helium. Computations were fulfilled inside a fixed domain with the use of the vortex filament method. The purpose of this study was to ascertain the role of the various factors arising in the numerical procedure, such as change in length in the reconnection processes, the procedures regulating the amount of points on the lines, eliminations of very small loops below the space resolution as well as the evaporation of the loops from the volume. We would like to stress that the widely accepted mechanism-a cascadelike transfer of the energy by nonlinear Kelvin waves (and radiation of sound)-was not considered. One of the reasons is that the space resolution along the lines did not allow to detect generation of high harmonics, moreover, particularly to get harmonics, which really radiate sound. In addition, the use of the method assumes that the fluid is incompressible. Numerical simulations have been performed for the cubic domain with transparent walls embedded in an unbounded space, and for a cube with solid smooth walls. Calculations showed that in the case of unlimited space the decay of quantum turbulence caused by the evaporation of vortex loops, which is implemented in a diffusion-like manner. The rate of the attenuation of the vortex line density agrees with the one, predicted by the theory of diffusion of nonuniform vortex tangles. In the case of a cube with solid walls, the main decay is also due to the diffusion of the vortex loops to boundaries. The vortex loops, whose ends glide on a smooth wall, execute the sophisticated motion (especially when they jump from the one face to the other) with many subsequent reconnections. As a result, there appear smaller and smaller loops with a size of few spatial resolutions, which were removed from the calculation. Indirect comparison with the experiments shows that the time of decay agrees with the measured data.