Related papers: Zonal Flows and Turbulence in Fluids and Plasmas
In homogeneous drift-wave (DW) turbulence, zonal flows (ZFs) can be generated via a modulational instability (MI) that either saturates monotonically or leads to oscillations of the ZF energy at the nonlinear stage. This dynamics is often…
We report experimental observations of a controlled transition from a zonal-flow (ZF) dominated regime to a coexistence regime of ZFs and streamers, and finally to a streamer-dominated state in a linear magnetized plasma column. The…
Turbulence driven zonal flows play an important role in fusion devices since they improve plasma confinement by limiting the level of anomalous transport. Current theories mostly focus on flow excitation but do not self-consistently…
The main objective of this article is to derive a mathematical theory associated with the nonlinear stability and dynamic transitions of the basic shear flows associated with baroclinic instability, which plays a fundamental role in the…
The instability of ideal non-divergent zonal flows on the sphere is determined numerically by the instability criterion of Arnol'd (1966) for the sectional curvature. Zonal flows are unstable for all perturbations besides for a small set…
This paper reports the stability conditions for intense zonal flows (ZFs) and the growth rate $\gamma_{\rm TI}$ of the corresponding "tertiary" instability (TI) within the generalized Hasegawa--Mima plasma model. The analytic calculation…
Laminar-turbulent pattern formation is a distinctive feature of the intermittency regime in subcritical plane shear flows. By performing extensive numerical simulations of the plane channel flow, we show that the pattern emerges from a…
General problem of plasma turbulence can be formulated as advection of potential vorticity (PV), which handles flow self-organization, coupled to a number of other fields, whose gradients provide free energy sources. Therefore, focusing on…
The Hasegawa-Wakatani equations, coupling plasma density and electrostatic potential through an approximation to the physics of parallel electron motions, are a simple model that describes resistive drift wave turbulence. We present…
The properties of the edge ion-scale turbulence are studied using the beam emission spectroscopy (BES) diagnostic on MAST. Evidence of the formation of large-scale high-amplitude coherent structures, filamentary density blobs and holes,…
We carry out a general study of the stability of astrophysical flows that appear steady in a uniformly rotating frame. Such a flow might correspond to a stellar pulsation mode or an accretion disk with a free global distortion giving it…
Quasigeostrophic flows are induced by spatial variations in interior potential vorticity and boundary buoyancy. We begin by developing the geostrophic turbulence theory of boundary buoyancy anomalies in a fluid with vanishing potential…
Zonal jets and non-zonal large-scale flows are often present in forced-dissipative barotropic turbulence on a beta-plane. The dynamics underlying the formation of both zonal and non-zonal coherent structures is investigated in this work…
Elastic turbulence is a spatially and temporally disordered flow state appearing in viscoelastic fluids at vanishing fluid inertia and large elasticity. The resulting flows have broad technological interest, particularly to enhance mixing…
Geophysical turbulence is observed to self-organize into large-scale flows such as zonal jets and coherent vortices. Previous studies on barotropic beta-plane turbulence have shown that coherent flows emerge out of a background of…
We investigate the non-linear equilibration of a two-layer quasi-geostrophic flow in a channel forced by an imposed unstable zonal mean flow, paying particular attention to the role of bottom friction. In the limit of low bottom friction,…
Abrupt transition to turbulence may occur in pipe and channel flows at moderate flow rates, an unexpected event according to linear stability theory, and has been an open problem in fluid dynamics for more than a century. Extensive…
A fluid system is derived to describe electrostatic magnetized plasma turbulence at scales somewhat larger than the Larmor radius of a given species. It is related to the Hasegawa- Mima equation, but does not conserve enstrophy, and, as a…
In many plasma systems, introducing a small background shear flow is enough to stabilize the system linearly. The nonlinear dynamics are much less sensitive to sheared flows than the average linear growthrates, and very small amplitude…
This work is devoted to the study of the influence of temperature anisotropy and parallel heat flux on the stability of supersonic shear flow in collisionless plasmas. Within a fluid-based framework, we employ the 16-moment transport…