STUDIES OF TURBULENCE IN A SAMPLE OF TRAPPED ATOMIC
SUPERFLUID
Vanderlei S. Bagnato
Instituto de Física de São Carlos,
Departamento de Física e Ciência dos Materiais,
University of Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil.
Email: [email protected]
In spite of being a phenomenon studied for centuries, turbulence remains a mystery of nature. In low
temperature physics, turbulence has been investigated in superfluid helium during the last decades.
Due to the quantum nature of superfuids, this phenomenon is known as Quantum Turbulence and it
is characterized by a particular configuration of quantized vortices in the sample. Recently, this
topic started to be investigated in a different kind of superfuids, namely, trapped atomic BoseEinstein condensates (BEC). In this presentation we review the first experimental evidences of
Quantum Turbulence in a BEC of 87Rb. We describe our most important observations and analyze
possible research perspectives.