Matter Wave Turbulence: Beyond Kinetic Scaling

TL;DR

This paper investigates turbulence in ultracold Bose gases, revealing universal scaling laws and anomalous infrared behavior through quantum field theoretical analysis, with potential experimental implications.

Contribution

It introduces a nonperturbative quantum field theory approach to characterize turbulence scaling beyond traditional kinetic theories in ultracold gases.

Findings

Perturbative Kolmogorov scaling valid at high energies.

Anomalous scaling exponents found in infrared regime.

Enhanced long-range correlations potentially observable experimentally.

Abstract

Turbulent scaling phenomena are studied in an ultracold Bose gas away from thermal equilibrium. Fixed points of the dynamical evolution are characterized in terms of universal scaling exponents of correlation functions. The scaling behavior is determined analytically in the framework of quantum field theory, using a nonperturbative approximation of the two-particle irreducible effective action. While perturbative Kolmogorov scaling is recovered at higher energies, scaling solutions with anomalously large exponents arise in the infrared regime of the turbulence spectrum. The extraordinary enhancement in the momentum dependence of long-range correlations could be experimentally accessible in dilute ultracold atomic gases. Such experiments have the potential to provide insight into dynamical phenomena directly relevant also in other present-day focus areas like heavy-ion collisions and early-universe cosmology.