No Arabic abstract
Turbulence in a system of nonlinearly interacting waves is referred to as wave turbulence. It has been known since seminal work by Kolmogorov, that turbulent dynamics is controlled by a directional energy flux through the wavelength scales. We demonstrate that an energy cascade in wave turbulence can be bi-directional, that is, can simultaneously flow towards large and small wavelength scales from the pumping scales at which it is injected. This observation is in sharp contrast to existing experiments and wave turbulence theory where the energy flux only flows in one direction. We demonstrate that the bi-directional energy cascade changes the energy budget in the system and leads to formation of large-scale, large-amplitude waves similar to oceanic rogue waves. To study surface wave turbulence, we took advantage of capillary waves on a free, weakly charged surface of superfluid helium He-II at temperature 1.7K. Although He-II demonstrates non-classical thermomechanical effects and quantized vorticity, waves on its surface are identical to those on a classical Newtonian fluid with extremely low viscosity. The possibility of directly driving a charged surface by an oscillating electric field and the low viscosity of He-II have allowed us to isolate the surface dynamics and study nonlinear surface waves in a range of frequencies much wider than in experiments with classical fluids.
The low wavenumber expansion of the energy spectrum takes the well known form: $ E(k,t) = E_2(t) k^2 + E_4(t) k^4 + ... $, where the coefficients are weighted integrals against the correlation function $C(r,t)$. We show that expressing $E(k,t)$ in terms of the longitudinal correlation function $f(r,t)$ immediately yields $E_2(t)=0$ by cancellation. We verify that the same result is obtained using the correlation function $C(r,t)$, provided only that $f(r,t)$ falls off faster than $r^{-3}$ at large values of $r$. As power-law forms are widely studied for the purpose of establishing bounds, we consider the family of model correlations $f(r,t)=alpha_n(t)r^{-n}$, for positive integer $n$, at large values of the separation $r$. We find that for the special case $n=3$, the relationship connecting $f(r,t)$ and $C(r,t)$ becomes indeterminate, and (exceptionally) $E_2 eq 0$, but that this solution is unphysical in that the viscous term in the K{a}rm{a}n-Howarth equation vanishes. Lastly, we show that $E_4(t)$ is independent of time, without needing to assume the exponential decrease of correlation functions at large distances.
We analyze analytically and numerically the scale invariant stationary solution to the internal wave kinetic equation. Our analysis of the resonant energy transfers shows that the leading order contributions are given (i) by triads with extreme scale separation and (ii) by triads of waves that are quasi-colinear in the horizontal plane. The contributions from other types of triads is found to be subleading. We use the modified scale invariant limit of the Garrett and Munk spectrum of internal waves to calculate the magnitude of the energy flux towards high wave numbers in both the vertical and the horizontal directions. Our results compare favorably with the finescale parametrization of ocean mixing that was proposed in [Polzin et al. (1995)].
We investigate experimentally turbulence of surface gravity waves in the Coriolis facility in Grenoble by using both high sensitivity local probes and a time and space resolved stereoscopic reconstruction of the water surface. We show that the water deformation is made of the superposition of weakly nonlinear waves following the linear dispersion relation and of bound waves resulting from non resonant triadic interaction. Although the theory predicts a 4-wave resonant coupling supporting the presence of an inverse cascade of wave action, we do not observe such inverse cascade. We investigate 4-wave coupling by computing the tricoherence i.e. 4-wave correlations. We observed very weak values of the tricoherence at the frequencies excited on the linear dispersion relation that are consistent with the hypothesis of weak coupling underlying the weak turbulence theory.
In a recent work, we proposed a hypothesis that the turbulence in gases could be produced by particles interacting via a potential - for example, the interatomic potential at short ranges, and the electrostatic potential at long ranges. Here, we examine the proposed mechanics of turbulence formation in a simple model of two particles, which interact solely via a potential. Following the kinetic theory approach, we derive a hierarchy of the velocity moment transport equations, and then truncate it via a novel closure based on the high Reynolds number condition. While standard closures of the velocity moment hierarchy of the Boltzmann equation lead to the compressible Euler and Navier-Stokes systems of equations, our closure leads to a transport equation for the velocity alone, which is driven by the potential forcing. Starting from a large scale laminar shear flow, we numerically simulate the solutions of our velocity transport equation for the electrostatic, gravity, Thomas-Fermi and Lennard-Jones potentials, as well as the Vlasov-type large scale mean field potential. In all studied scenarios, the time-averaged Fourier spectra of the kinetic energy clearly exhibit Kolmogorovs five-thirds power decay rate.
In elastic-wave turbulence, strong turbulence appears in small wave numbers while weak turbulence does in large wave numbers. Energy transfers in the coexistence of these turbulent states are numerically investigated in both of the Fourier space and the real space. An analytical expression of a detailed energy balance reveals from which mode to which mode energy is transferred in the triad interaction. Stretching energy excited by external force is transferred nonlocally and intermittently to large wave numbers as the kinetic energy in the strong turbulence. In the weak turbulence, the resonant interactions according to the weak turbulence theory produces cascading net energy transfer to large wave numbers. Because the systems nonlinearity shows strong temporal intermittency, the energy transfers are investigated at active and moderate phases separately. The nonlocal interactions in the Fourier space are characterized by the intermittent bundles of fibrous structures in the real space.