Producing and imaging quantum turbulence via pair-breaking in superfluid \textsuperscript{3}He-B

Abstract

Destroying superfluidity is a fundamental process and in fermionic superfluid such as \textsuperscript{3}He-B it splits Cooper pairs into thermal excitations, quasiparticles. At the lowest temperatures, a gas of these quasiparticle excitations is tenuous enough for the propagation to be ballistic. We describe here an exploitation of the ballistic quasiparticles as the ``photons’’ to observe the local destruction of superfluid \textsuperscript{3}He-B by a mechanical resonator. We use a 5 by 5 pixel quasiparticle camera to image an emergence of quasiparticle excitations and a tangle of quantized vortices accompanying the pair-breaking. The detected quantum tangle is asymmetric around the mechanical resonator and is governed by the stability of vortices on the resonator surface. The vortex distribution shows that a conventional production of a quantum tangle via repetitive emission of vortex rings starts on the top surface of the generator and spreads around whole surface at high velocity when escaping vortex rings get re-trapped by the moving resonator

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