“Caltech’s Richard Feynman was one of the first to recognize that superfluids are governed by so-called vortex filaments, which are basically long strings of pure vorticity,” Schröder says. Viscosity is a fluid’s resistance to deformation. The Schrödinger equation, the basic description of quantum mechanical behavior, can be used to describe the motion of superfluids, which are fluids supercooled to temperatures near absolute zero that behave as though they are without viscosity. “What’s unique about our method is that we took a page from the quantum mechanics’s ‘playbook.'” “Since we are computer graphics folks, we are interested in methods that capture the visual variety and drama of fluids well,” says Schröder.
The new technique lets computers more accurately simulate vorticity, the spinning motion of a flowing fluid.Ī smoke ring, which seems to turn itself inside out endlessly as it floats along, is a complex demonstration of vorticity, and is incredibly difficult to simulate accurately, says Peter Schröder, professor of computer science and applied and computational mathematics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech. University California Institute of TechnologyĪpplied scientists have developed a new way to simulate large-scale motion numerically using the mathematics that govern the universe at the quantum level.