Radiative heating achieves the ultimate regime of thermal convection

The absorption of light or radiation drives turbulent convection inside stars, supernovae, frozen lakes, and Earth's mantle. In these contexts, the goal of laboratory and numerical studies is to determine the relation between the internal temperature gradients and the heat flux transported by the turbulent flow. This is the constitutive law of turbulent convection, to be input into large-scale models of such natural flows. However, in contrast with the radiative heating of natural flows, laboratory experiments have focused on convection driven by heating and cooling plates; the heat transport is then severely restricted by boundary layers near the plates, which prevents the realization of the mixing length scaling law used in evolution models of geophysical and astrophysical flows. There is therefore an important discrepancy between the scaling laws measured in laboratory experiments and those used, e.g., in stellar evolution models. Here we provide experimental and numerical evidence that radiatively driven convection spontaneously achieves the mixing length scaling regime, also known as the ultimate regime of thermal convection. This constitutes a clear observation of this regime of turbulent convection. Our study therefore bridges the gap between models of natural flows and laboratory experiments. It opens an experimental avenue for a priori determinations of the constitutive laws to be implemented into models of geophysical and astrophysical flows, as opposed to empirical fits of these constitutive laws to the scarce observational data.