Quantum turbulence by vortex stirring in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate

Abstract

We introduce a mechanism to develop a turbulent flow in a spinor Bose-Einstein condensate, consisting in the stirring of a single line vortex by means of an external magnetic field. We find that density and velocity fluctuations have white-noise power spectra at large frequencies and that the energy spectrum obeys Kolmogorov 5/3 law in the turbulent region. As the stirring is turned off, the flow decays to an agitated nonequilibrium state that shows an energy bottleneck crossover at small length scales. We demonstrate our findings by numerically solving two-state spinor coupled three-dimensional Gross-Pitaevskii equations. We suggest that this mechanism may be experimentally implemented in spinor ultracold gases confined by optical traps.