2006/12/31 by Michael Chertkov, M. Chertkov, Colm Connaughton +5
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Atomic physics #Cascade #Condensation #Dipole #Energy (signal processing) #Energy cascade #Energy spectrum #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Inverse #Mechanics #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Quantum, superfluid, helium dynamics #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Thermodynamics #Turbulence #Vortex #cond-mat.stat-mech #nlin.CD #physics.flu-dyn
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.99.084501
4 pages, 4 figures. This version includes some additional phenomenological explanations of the results, additional references and improved figures
arxiv created 2007/02/28 · openalex publication_date 2007/08/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We report a numerical study, supplemented by phenomenological explanations, of "energy condensation" in forced 2D turbulence in a biperiodic box. Condensation is a finite size effect which occurs after the standard inverse cascade reaches the size of the system. It leads to the emergence of a coherent vortex dipole. We show that the time growth of the dipole is self-similar, and it contains most of the injected energy, thus resulting in an energy spectrum which is markedly steeper than the standard k-5/3 one. Once the coherent component is subtracted, however, the remaining fluctuations have a spectrum close to k-1. The fluctuations decay slowly as the coherent part grows.