Statistical Equilibrium of Large Scales in Three-Dimensional Hydrodynamic Turbulence

Jean-Baptiste Gorce and Eric Falcon

Université Paris Cité, MSC Laboratory, UMR 7057 CNRS, F-75 013 Paris, France



Reference: Physical Review Letters 129, 054501 (2022)   

URL: https://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.054501
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.054501

Abstract:
We investigate experimentally three-dimensional (3D) hydrodynamic turbulence at scales larger than the forcing scale. We manage to perform a scale separation between the forcing scale and the container size by injecting energy into the fluid using centimetric magnetic particles. We measure the statistics of the fluid velocity field at scales larger than the forcing scale (energy spectra, velocity distributions, and energy flux spectrum). In particular, we show that the large-scale dynamics are in statistical equilibrium and can be described with an effective temperature, although not isolated from the turbulent Kolmogorov cascade. In the large-scale domain, the energy flux is zero on average but exhibits intense temporal fluctuations. Our Letter paves the way to use equilibrium statistical mechanics to describe the large-scale properties of 3D turbulent flows.

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