Decay of superfluid turbulence via Kelvin wave radiation and vortex reconnections

Abstract

The elementary processes involved in the decay of superfluid turbulence in the limit of low temperature are studied by numerical simulations of vortex ring collisions. We find that small vortex rings produced by reconnections eventually annihilate in a collision where all their energy is converted into Kelvin waves and sound. We show that sound emission due to Kelvin waves also leads to a loss of vortex line length but this dissipation mechanism alone is too small to account for the experimentally observed decay.