English

Conformal invariance in three-dimensional rotating turbulence

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems 2015-05-27 v1 Fluid Dynamics

Abstract

We examine three--dimensional turbulent flows in the presence of solid-body rotation and helical forcing in the framework of stochastic Schramm-L\"owner evolution curves (SLE). The data stems from a run on a grid of 153631536^3 points, with Reynolds and Rossby numbers of respectively 5100 and 0.06. We average the parallel component of the vorticity in the direction parallel to that of rotation, and examine the resulting <ωz>z<\omega_\textrm{z}>_\textrm{z} field for scaling properties of its zero-value contours. We find for the first time for three-dimensional fluid turbulence evidence of nodal curves being conformal invariant, belonging to a SLE class with associated Brownian diffusivity κ=3.6±0.1\kappa=3.6\pm 0.1. SLE behavior is related to the self-similarity of the direct cascade of energy to small scales in this flow, and to the partial bi-dimensionalization of the flow because of rotation. We recover the value of κ\kappa with a heuristic argument and show that this value is consistent with several non-trivial SLE predictions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1104.1658,
  title  = {Conformal invariance in three-dimensional rotating turbulence},
  author = {S. Thalabard and D. Rosenberg and A. Pouquet and P. D. Mininni},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.1658},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to PRL

R2 v1 2026-06-21T17:51:36.525Z