English

Instantons in a Lagrangian model of turbulence

Fluid Dynamics 2017-02-01 v1

Abstract

The role of instantons is investigated in the Lagrangian model for the velocity gradient evolution known as the Recent Fluid Deformation approximation. After recasting the model into the path-integral formalism, the probability distribution function is computed along with the most probable path in the weak noise limit through the saddle-point approximation. Evaluation of the instanton solution is implemented numerically by means of the iteratively Chernykh-Stepanov method. In the case of the longitudinal velocity gradient statistics, due to symmetry reasons, the number of degrees of freedom can be reduced to one, allowing the pdf to be evaluated analytically as well, thereby enabling a prediction of the scaling of the moments as a function of Reynolds number. It is also shown that the instanton solution lies on the Vieillefosse line concerning the RQ-plane. We illustrate how instantons can be unveiled in the stochastic dynamics performing a conditional statistics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1608.07332,
  title  = {Instantons in a Lagrangian model of turbulence},
  author = {Leonardo S. Grigorio and Freddy Bouchet and Rodrigo M. Pereira and Laurent Chevillard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1608.07332},
  year   = {2017}
}