Wave turbulence and vortices in Bose-Einstein condensation

Abstract

We report a numerical study of turbulence and Bose-Einstein condensation within the two-dimmensional Gross-Pitaevski model with repulsive interaction. In presence of weak forcing localized around some wave number in the Fourier space, we observe three qualitatively different evolution stages. At the initial stage a thermodynamic energy equipartition spectrum forms at both smaller and larger scales with respect to the forcing scale. This agrees with predictions of the the four-wave kinetic equation of the Wave Turbulence (WT) theory. At the second stage, WT breaks down at large scales and the interactions become strongly nonlinear. Here, we observe formation of a gas of quantum vortices whose number decreases due to an annihilation process helped by the acoustic component. This process leads to formation of a coherent-phase Bose-Einstein condensate. After such a coherent-phase condensate forms, evolution enters a third stage characterised by three-wave interactions of acoustic waves that can be described again using the WT theory.