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We have investigated the structure of macroscopic suction flows in superfluid 4 He. In this study, we primarily analyze the structure of the quantized vortex bundle that appears to play an important role in such systems. Our study is motivated by a series of recent experiments conducted by a research group at Osaka City University [Yano et al., J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 969, 012002 (2018)]; they created a suction vortex using a rotor in superfluid 4 He. They also reported that up to 10 4 quantized vortices accumulated in the central region of the rotating flow. The quantized vortices in such macroscopic flows are assumed to form a bundle structure; however, the mechanism has not yet been fully investigated. Therefore, we prescribe a macroscopic suction flow to the normal fluid and discuss the evolution of a giant vortex (i.e., one with a circulation quantum number exceeding unity) and a bundle of singly quantized vortices from a small number of seed vortices. Then, using numerical simulations, we discuss several possible characteristic structures of the bundle in such a flow, and we suggest that the actual steady-state bundle structure in the experiment can be verified by measuring the diffusion constant of the vortex bundle after the macroscopic normal flow has been switched off. By applying extensive knowledge of the superfluid 4 He system, we elucidate a type of macroscopic superfluid flow and identify a structure of quantized vortices.

Impurity injection into superfluid helium is a simple and appealing method with diverse applications, including high-precision spectroscopy, quantum computing with surface electrons, nano/micromaterial synthesis, and flow visualization. Quantized vortices play a major role in the interaction between superfluid helium and light impurities. However, the basic principle governing this interaction is still unclear for dense (high mass density and refractive index) materials, such as semiconductor and metal impurities. Here, we provide experimental evidence of the dense silicon nanoparticle attraction to the quantized vortex cores. We prepared the silicon nanoparticles via in situ laser ablation. Following laser ablation, we observed that the silicon nanoparticles formed curved filament–like structures, indicative of quantized vortex cores. We also observed that two accidentally intersecting quantized vortices exchanged their parts, a phenomenon called quantized vortex reconnection. This behavior closely matches the dynamical scaling of reconnections. Our results provide a previously unexplored method for visualizing and studying impurity-quantized vortex interactions.

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In this study, we numerically investigate the internal structure of localized quantum turbulence in superfluid 4 He at zero temperature with the expectation of self-similarity in the real space. In our previous study, we collected the statistics of vortex rings emitted from a localized vortex tangle. As a result, the power law between the minimum size of detectable vortex rings and the emission frequency is obtained, which suggests that the vortex tangle has self-similarity in the real space [Nakagawa et al., Phys. Rev. B 101, 184515 (2020)]. In this work, we study the fractal dimension and vortex length distribution of localized vortex tangles, which can show their self-similar structure. We generate statistically steady and localized vortex tangles by injecting vortex rings with a fixed size. We used two types of injection methods that produce anisotropic or isotropic tangles. The injected vortex rings develop into a localized vortex tangle consisting of vortex rings of various sizes through reconnections (fusions and splitting of vortices). The fractal dimension is an increasing function of the vortex line density and becomes saturated to a value of approximately 1.8, as the density increases sufficiently. The behavior of the fractal dimension was independent of the anisotropy of the vortex tangles. The vortex length distribution indicates the number of vortex rings of each size that are distributed in a tangle. The distribution of the anisotropic vortex tangle shows the power law in the range above the injected vortex size, although the distribution of the isotropic vortex does not.