Coupled normal fluid and superfluid profiles of turbulent helium II in channels

Abstract

We perform fully coupled two-dimensional numerical simulations of plane channel helium II counterflows with vortex-line density typical of experiments. The main features of our approach are the inclusion of the back reaction of the superfluid vortices on the normal fluid and the presence of solid boundaries. Despite the reduced dimensionality, our model is realistic enough to reproduce vortex density distributions across the channel recently calculated in three dimensions. We focus on the coarse-grained superfluid and normal fluid velocity profiles, recovering the normal fluid profile recently observed employing a technique based on laser-induced fluorescence of metastable helium molecules.