Anticipating a New Golden Age

The standard model of fundamental interactions is remarkably successful, but it leaves an unfinished agenda. Several major questions seem ripe for exploration in the near future. I anticipate that the coming decade will be a Golden Age of discovery in fundamental physics.Comment: 25 pages, 15 figures. Version 3: Added references, caption to Figure 14 correcte

Turbulence and turbulent pattern formation in a minimal model for active fluids

Active matter systems display a fascinating range of dynamical states, including stationary patterns and turbulent phases. While the former can be tackled with methods from the field of pattern formation, the spatio-temporal disorder of the active turbulence phase calls for a statistical description. Borrowing techniques from turbulence theory, we here establish a quantitative description of correlation functions and spectra of a minimal continuum model for active turbulence. Further exploring the parameter space, we also report on a surprising type of turbulence-driven pattern formation far beyond linear onset: the emergence of a dynamic hexagonal vortex lattice state after an extended turbulent transient, which can only be explained taking into account turbulent energy transfer across scales.Comment: Supplemental videos available at https://youtu.be/gbf6cRho03w https://youtu.be/n0qUUhAUJFQ https://youtu.be/LGmamkM012

Equation of State in a Strongly Interacting Relativistic System

We study the evolution of the equation of state of a strongly interacting quark system as a function of the diquark interaction strength. We show that for the system to avoid collapsing into a pressureless Boson gas at sufficiently strong diquark coupling strength, the diquark-diquark repulsion has to be self-consistently taken into account. In particular, we find that the tendency at zero temperature of the strongly interacting diquark gas to condense into the system ground state is compensated by the repulsion between diquarks if the diquark-diquark coupling constant is higher than a critical value $\lambda_C=7.65$. Considering such diquark-diquark repulsion, a positive pressure with no significant variation along the whole strongly interacting region is obtained. A consequence of the diquark-diquark repulsion is that the system maintains its BCS character in the whole strongly interacting region.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figs, To appear in Phys. Rev.

Dissipation Layers in Rayleigh-B\'{e}nard Convection: A Unifying View

Boundary layers play an important role in controlling convective heat transfer. Their nature varies considerably between different application areas characterized by different boundary conditions, which hampers a uniform treatment. Here, we argue that, independent from boundary conditions, systematic dissipation measurements in Rayleigh-B\'enard convection capture the relevant near-wall structures. By means of direct numerical simulations with varying Prandtl numbers, we demonstrate that such dissipation layers share central characteristics with classical boundary layers, but, in contrast to the latter, can be extended naturally to arbitrary boundary conditions. We validate our approach by explaining differences in scaling behavior observed for no-slip and stress-free boundaries, thus paving the way to an extension of scaling theories developed for laboratory convection to a broad class of natural systems

Modeling space-time correlations of velocity fluctuations in wind farms

An analytical model for the streamwise velocity space-time correlations in turbulent flows is derived and applied to the special case of velocity fluctuations in large wind farms. The model is based on the Kraichnan-Tennekes random sweeping hypothesis, capturing the decorrelation in time while including a mean wind velocity in the streamwise direction. In the resulting model, the streamwise velocity space-time correlation is expressed as a convolution of the pure space correlation with an analytical temporal decorrelation kernel. Hence, the spatio-temporal structure of velocity fluctuations in wind farms can be derived from the spatial correlations only. We then explore the applicability of the model to predict spatio-temporal correlations in turbulent flows in wind farms. Comparisons of the model with data from a large eddy simulation of flow in a large, spatially periodic wind farm are performed, where needed model parameters such as spatial and temporal integral scales and spatial correlations are determined from the large eddy simulation. Good agreement is obtained between the model and large eddy simulation data showing that spatial data may be used to model the full temporal structure of fluctuations in wind farms.Comment: Submitted to Wind Energ

The Lundgren-Monin-Novikov Hierarchy: Kinetic Equations for Turbulence

We present an overview of recent works on the statistical description of turbulent flows in terms of probability density functions (PDFs) in the framework of the Lundgren-Monin-Novikov (LMN) hierarchy. Within this framework, evolution equations for the PDFs are derived from the basic equations of fluid motion. The closure problem arises either in terms of a coupling to multi-point PDFs or in terms of conditional averages entering the evolution equations as unknown functions. We mainly focus on the latter case and use data from direct numerical simulations (DNS) to specify the unclosed terms. Apart from giving an introduction into the basic analytical techniques, applications to two-dimensional vorticity statistics, to the single-point velocity and vorticity statistics of three-dimensional turbulence, to the temperature statistics of Rayleigh-B\'enard convection and to Burgers turbulence are discussed.Comment: Accepted for publication in C. R. Acad. Sc

Near-Zero Modes in Superconducting Graphene

Vortices in the simplest superconducting state of graphene contain very low energy excitations, whose existence is connected to an index theorem that applies strictly to an approximate form of the relevant Bogoliubov-deGennes equations. When Zeeman interactions are taken into account, the zero modes required by the index theorem are (slightly) displaced. Thus the vortices acquire internal structure, that plausibly supports interesting dynamical phenomena.Comment: 9 pages, to appear in Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium on Graphene and Quantum Matte

Systematic Study Of Leptonic Mixing In A Class Of SU_H(2) Models

We perform a systematic analysis of the PMNS matrices which arise when one assigns the three generations of leptons to the $2\oplus 1$ representation of a horizontal $SU_H(2)$ symmetry. This idea has been previously explored by Kuchimanchi and Mohapatra. However, we assume $(i)$ the neutrino mass matrix results from leptonic couplings to $SU_L(2)$ triplet scalar fields and $(ii)$ hierarchies exist amongst lepton mass matrix elements which result from couplings to scalar fields with different $SU_H(2)$ charges. Of the sixteen candidate PMNS matrices which result it is found that only one is both predictive and possesses a leading order structure compatible with experimental data. The relevant neutrino mass matrix displays the symmetry $L_e-L_\mu-L_\tau$ to leading order and we explore the perturbations required to produce a realistic lepton spectrum. The effective mass in neutrinoless double beta decay is required to lie in the range $/(10^{-2}\mathrm{eV})\in[0.7,2.5]$, which is just below current experimental bounds. $U_{e3}$ is non-zero but not uniquely determined.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev.