Trajectory statistics and turbulence evolution

TL;DR

This paper investigates how trajectory trapping influences turbulence organization in two-dimensional ideal fluids, linking it to inverse energy cascade and vorticity concentration through a semi-analytic study.

Contribution

It introduces a semi-analytic method to analyze vorticity trajectory statistics and highlights the role of trajectory trapping in turbulence evolution and energy transfer.

Findings

Trajectory trapping leads to vorticity separation by sign.

Large scale vortices induce opposite transverse drifts for positive and negative vorticity.

Inverse cascade is associated with increased circulation of large vortices.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to understand the tendency to organization of the turbulence in two-dimensional ideal fluids. We show that nonlinear processes as inverse cascade of the energy and vorticity concentration are essentially determined by trajectory trapping or eddying. The statistics of the trajectories of the vorticity elements is studied using a semianalytic method. The separation of the positive and negative vorticity is due to the attraction produced by a large scale vortex on the small scale vortices of the same sign. More precisely, a large scale velocity is shown to determine average transverse drifts, which have opposite orientations for positive and negative vorticity. They appear in the presence of trapping and lead to energy flow to large scales due to the increase of the circulation of the large vortex. Recent results on drift turbulence evolution in magnetically confined plasmas are discussed in order to underline the idea that there is a link between the inverse cascade and trajectory trapping. The physical mechanisms are different in fluids and plasmas due to the different types of nonlinearities of the two systems, but trajectory trapping has the main role in both cases.