Comment on ''Negative temperature of vortex motion''

In a recent Brief Report and subsequently [Phys. Rev. A 43, 2050 (1991); 44, 8439 (1991)], Berdichevsky, Kunin, and Hussain claim that the ''Boltzmann temperature'' of a bounded point vortex system is always positive, and that the spatial inhomogeneities that evolve at high energies in such a system are incompatible with ergodicity of the dynamics. The argument given to support these claims neglected the presence of the fluid boundary. We prove that the Boltzmann temperature is in fact always negative, and present evidence that the vortex clumping that has been observed in simulations is consistent with ergodic dynamics