Turbulence and large-scale structures in self-gravitating superfluids
Phys. Rev. Fluids 10, 114601 – Published 3 November, 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/7jtd-kybt
Abstract
I study turbulence in self-gravitating superfluids by performing direct numerical simulations of the three-dimensional (3D) Gross-Pitaevskii-Poisson (GPP) equation, which is also a model for dark-matter halos around galaxies. In the absence of self-gravity, the spectrally truncated Gross-Pitaevskii (GP) equation shows the emergence of Kolmogorov's scaling in the incompressible kinetic-energy spectrum. Introducing self-gravity, I observe the formation of different structures, from sheetlike to spherically collapsed structures, which introduce a minimum in the kinetic-energy spectrum that corresponds to the sizes of these structures. The system shows early convergence towards statistically stationary states, which I show by the onset of thermalization in the compressible kinetic-energy spectrum, where . I also show that the formation of such large-scale structures suggests that the particles (bosons) move from small to large scales through an inverse cascade, supporting a mechanism for the formation of large-scale structures, such as dark-matter halos, around our galaxy Milky Way.
