Large-scale normal fluid circulation in helium superflows

Abstract

We perform fully coupled numerical simulations of helium II pure superflows in a channel, with vortex-line density typical of experiments. Peculiar to our model is the computation of the back-reaction of the superfluid vortex motion on the normal fluid and the presence of solid boundaries.We recover the uniform vortex-line density experimentally measured employing second sound resonators and we show that pure superflow in helium II is associated with a large-scale circulation of the normal fluid which can be detected using existing particle-tracking visualization techniques.