A Linear Stochastic Model of Turbulent Cascades and Fractional Fields

TL;DR

This paper introduces a linear stochastic model that captures the essence of turbulent energy cascades, showing convergence to fractional Gaussian fields and providing insights into the statistical properties of turbulence.

Contribution

It constructs a novel linear equation model for turbulent cascades that reproduces key statistical features and convergence behavior observed in turbulence phenomena.

Findings

Solution is smooth at finite times.

Converges to a fractional Gaussian field at infinite time.

Model captures power-law behaviors of turbulence statistics.

Abstract

Turbulent cascades characterize the transfer of energy injected by a random force at large scales towards the small scales. In hydrodynamic turbulence, when the Reynolds number is large, the velocity field of the fluid becomes irregular and the rate of energy dissipation remains bounded from below even if the fluid viscosity tends to zero. A mathematical description of the turbulent cascade is a very active research topic since the pioneering work of Kolmogorov in hydrodynamic turbulence and that of Zakharov in wave turbulence. In both cases, these turbulent cascade mechanisms imply power-law behaviors of several statistical quantities such as power spectral densities. For a long time, these cascades were believed to be associated with nonlinear interactions, but recent works have shown that they can also take place in a dynamics governed by a linear equation with a differential operator of degree 0. In this spirit, we construct a linear equation that mimics the phenomenology of energy cascades when the external force is a statistically homogeneous and stationary stochastic process. In the Fourier variable, this equation can be seen as a linear transport equation, which corresponds to an operator of degree 0 in physical space. Our results give a complete characterization of the solution: it is smooth at any finite time, and, up to smaller order corrections, it converges to a fractional Gaussian field at infinite time.