Single to multiple acoustic vortex excitations in the transition to defect-mediated dust acoustic wave turbulence.

We experimentally investigate the cooperative excitations in the transition from a self-excited three-dimensional ordered plane wave to a defect-mediated turbulence (DMT) state with multiple unstable defect filaments in a dusty plasma system. It is found that, with increasing effective driving, a single acoustic vortex (AV) with positive or negative helicity winding around a long straight defect filament with small wiggling in the 2+1D (dimensional) space-time space starts to emerge along the center axis of the small dust cluster. The sequential ruptures of the crest surfaces from the cluster boundary followed by their reconnection with adjacent ruptured crest surfaces, or repelling one of the pairwise generated defects out of the boundary, are the key for the single AV generation. Further increasing driving makes the single defect filament exhibit helical excursion in the 2+1D space. The system eventually enters the state with a few short-lived AVs and the DMT state with multiple AVs. The gradual increasing defect filament fluctuations and defect number in the transition to the DMT more strongly distort the nearby waveforms, which leads to the transition from the emergence of distinct sideband peaks to the broadened peaks in the power spectra of temporal dust density fluctuation. For the system with a larger cluster size, the single AV states are skipped in the transition to the DMT state.