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We present measurements of the damping experienced by custom-made quartz tuning forks submerged in 3He covering frequencies from 20 to 600 kHz. Measurements were conducted in the bulk of normal liquid 3He at temperatures from 1.5 K down to 12 mK and in superfluid 3He-B well below the critical temperature. The presented results complement earlier work on tuning fork damping in 3He, removing possible ambiguities associated with acoustic emission within partially enclosed volumes and extend the probed range of frequencies, leading to a clearly established frequency dependence of the acoustic losses. Our results validate existing models of damping and point toward the same mechanism of wave emission of first sound in normal 3He and liquid 4He and zero sound in superfluid 3He. We observe a steep frequency dependence of the damping ≈ f 5.5, which starts to dominate around 100 kHz and restricts the use of tuning forks as efficient sensors in quantum fluids. The acoustic emission model can predict the limiting frequencies for various devices, including micro-electromechanical and nano-electromechanical structures developed for quantum turbulence and single vortex dynamics research.

Summary Secondary structures provide a deep insight into the protein architecture. They can serve for comparison between individual protein family members. The most straightforward way how to deal with protein secondary structure is its visualization using 2D diagrams. Several software tools for the generation of 2D diagrams were developed. Unfortunately, they create 2D diagrams based on only a single protein. Therefore, 2D diagrams of two proteins from one family markedly differ. For this reason, we developed the 2DProts database, which contains secondary structure 2D diagrams for all domains from the CATH and all proteins from PDB databases. These 2D diagrams are generated based on a whole protein family, and they also consider information about the 3D arrangement of secondary structure elements. Moreover, 2DProts database contains multiple 2D diagrams, which provide an overview of a whole protein family's secondary structures. 2DProts is updated weekly and is integrated into CATH. Availability and Implementation Freely accessible at https://2dprots.ncbr.muni.cz. The web interface was implemented in JavaScript. The database was implemented in Python. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Superconducting heat switches with extremely low normal state resistances are needed for constructing continuous nuclear demagnetization refrigerators with high cooling power. Aluminum is a suitable superconductor for the heat switch because of its high Debye temperature and its commercial availability in high purity. We have constructed a high quality Al heat switch whose design is significantly different than that of previous heat switches. In order to join the Al to Cu with low contact resistance, we plasma etched the Al to remove its oxide layer and then immediately deposited Au without breaking the vacuum of the e-beam evaporator. In the normal state of the heat switch, we measured a thermal conductance of 8 T W/K2, which is equivalent to an electrical resistance of 3 nΩ according to the Wiedemann–Franz law. In the superconducting state, we measured a thermal conductance that is 2 × 106 times lower than that of the normal state at 50 mK.

We report an experimental study of oscillatory thermal counterflow of superfluid $^{4}\mathrm{He}$ and its transition to quantum turbulence inspired by the work of Kotsubo and Swift [Phys. Rev. Lett. 62, 2604 (1989)]. We use a pair of transversally oriented second-sound sensors to provide direct proof that upon exceeding a critical heat flux, quantized vorticity is generated in the antinodes of the longitudinal resonances of the oscillating counterflow. Building on modern understanding of oscillatory flows of superfluid $^{4}\mathrm{He}$ [D. Schmoranzer et al., Phys. Rev. B 99, 054511 (2019)], we re-evaluate the original data together with ours and provide grounds for the previously unexplained temperature dependence of critical velocities. Our analysis incorporates a classical flow instability in the normal component described by the dimensionless Donnelly number, which is shown to trigger quantum turbulence at temperatures below $\ensuremath{\approx}1.7\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{K}$. This contrasts with the original interpretation based on the dynamics of quantized vortices, and we show that for oscillatory counterflow, such an approach is valid only at temperatures above $\ensuremath{\approx}1.8\phantom{\rule{0.16em}{0ex}}\mathrm{K}$. Finally, we demonstrate that the instabilities occurring in oscillatory counterflow are governed by the same underlying physics as those in flow due to submerged oscillators and propose a unified description of high Stokes number coflow and counterflow experiments.

Quantum turbulence—the stochastic motion of quantum fluids such as 4 He and 3 He-B, which display pure superfluidity at zero temperature and two-fluid behavior at finite but low temperatures—has been a subject of intense experimental, theoretical, and numerical studies over the last half a century. Yet, there does not exist a satisfactory phenomenological framework that captures the rich variety of experimental observations, physical properties, and characteristic features, at the same level of detail as incompressible turbulence in conventional viscous fluids. Here we present such a phenomenology that captures in simple terms many known features and regimes of quantum turbulence, in both the limit of zero temperature and the temperature range of two-fluid behavior.