A type of turbulence that only exists in the quantum realm has been directly observed for the first time. This “ultraquantum” turbulence may be representative of what happens in many exotic settings, from liquid helium to neutron stars.

Turbulence refers to chaotic and irregular currents in a liquid or gas that is perturbed, like unruly versions of whirlpools you create by stirring a cup of tea. Many fluids we encounter daily behave this way, but fluids and gases in the quantum realm follow completely different rules. When perturbed and made turbulent, they remain largely still, but become pocked with thin, tangled, string-like whirlpools before quieting down into equilibrium.

To get a look at this ultraquantum turbulence, Sebastian Morris at the University of Cambridge and his colleagues started with thousands of potassium atoms that they had cooled very close to absolute zero – the coldest temperature possible – with lasers and electromagnetic fields. This made the atoms behave like a very dilute quantum gas.

With the same tools, the researchers corralled the atoms into the shape of a cylinder a few dozen micrometres in size. By controlling the atoms’ interactions with each other and their energies, they could also create a disturbance that would engender turbulence and vortices.

Imaging the whole cylinder would have hidden the tangles, so Morris and his colleagues used a sheet of laser light to isolate and image just one slice of it.

“As soon as I got the first pictures, I felt like, this is the one,” he says. “You can see these holes, these imprints of the vortex lines as they wind in and out of this imaged cross-sectional slice.”

The researchers took many images and studied the distribution of vortices as they tangled, fell apart, connected into rings or moved to the cylinder’s edge, tracing how the quantum fluid became less and less turbulent and disordered. Intriguingly, they found this process to be very similar to what had previously been observed in liquid helium, which is also a quantum fluid, but one that is a lot denser and whose atoms interact more strongly.

The way order forms is similar for the two systems, but nothing else is, says team member Christoph Eigen at the University of Cambridge. This exemplifies a universal behaviour for a whole class of quantum systems, one that ought to show up in other, even more dissimilar settings, says Zoran Hadzibabic, who is also at the University of Cambridge and worked on the experiment.

Mathematical models for ultraquantum turbulence have existed for decades, but it is usually very difficult to image vortices, especially in a three-dimensional collection of atoms, says Thomas Gasenzer at Heidelberg University in Germany. The new work supports the models with precise and sophisticated experimental evidence, he says.

Davide Proment at the University of East Anglia in the UK says the new measurement is phenomenal and surpasses past investigations of ultraquantum turbulence. Future experiments aiming to image several slices of atoms simultaneously could reveal even more details of vortices’ behaviour, he says – and Morris’s team is interested in this idea too.

Because of the universality of the process, future experiments could also shed light on ultraquantum turbulence far away from the lab, says Gasenzer. “The same kind of [turbulence] dynamics has been proposed to happen, for example, in the dark matter halo of a neutron star, so maybe one should think about observables that could be compared between the two.”