Instantons and the Path to Intermittency in Turbulent Flows

Processes leading to anomalous fluctuations in turbulent flows, referred to as intermittency, are still challenging. We consider cascade trajectories through scales as realizations of a stochastic Langevin process for which multiplicative noise is an intrinsic feature of the turbulent state. The trajectories are conditioned on their entropy exchange. Such selected trajectories concentrate around an optimal path, called instanton, which is the minimum of an effective action. The action is derived from the Langevin equation, estimated from measured data. In particular instantons with negative entropy pinpoint the trajectories responsible for the emergence of non-Gaussian statistics at small scales.

Automated summary

This study examines the intermittency phenomenon and cascade trajectories in turbulent flows. The concept of an instanton, representing the optimal path among selected trajectories, is introduced to explain the emergence of non-Gaussian statistics at small scales.