Simons Foundation supports international collaboration to revisit the fundamental problems of fluid turbulence

The prestigious Simons Foundation of New York has announced funding for an international project to revisit the fundamental problems of fluid turbulence using statistical mechanics. The international consortium involves researchers from several French laboratories, including Freddy Bouchet of  Laboratoire de Physique at ENS de Lyon, Laurette Tuckerman of  ESPCI and Yves Pomeau of  École Polytechnique. He also involves Nigel Goldenfeld of the University of Illinois , Dwight Barkley of the University of Warwick , Björn Hof of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria , Gregory Falkovich of the Weizmann Institute of Science , Brad Marston of Brown University , Steve Tobias of Leeds University and Gregory Eyink of Johns Hopkins University. The richness of turbulence continues to pose a major challenge to theoretical physics. Due to the wide range of length and time scales intrinsic to the problem, the number of degrees of freedom in 3-D makes even detailed simulation of real turbulent flows challenging. This project uses novel statistical mechanics approaches to explore how fluids become turbulent and their properties in the strongly fluctuating turbulent state itself. Turbulence has two potentially universal scaling regimes: transitional (presumably a critical phenomenon) and high Reynolds number (presumably an asymptotic regime controlled by anomalies and associated phenomena).