Jets, Stickiness and Anomalous Transport

Dynamical and statistical properties of the vortex and passive particle advection in chaotic flows generated by four and sixteen point vortices are investigated. General transport properties of these flows are found anomalous and exhibit a superdiffusive behavior with typical second moment exponent (\mu \sim 1.75). The origin of this anomaly is traced back to the presence of coherent structures within the flow, the vortex cores and the region far from where vortices are located. In the vicinity of these regions stickiness is observed and the motion of tracers is quasi-ballistic. The chaotic nature of the underlying flow dictates the choice for thorough analysis of transport properties. Passive tracer motion is analyzed by measuring the mutual relative evolution of two nearby tracers. Some tracers travel in each other vicinity for relatively large times. This is related to an hidden order for the tracers which we call jets. Jets are localized and found in sticky regions. Their structure is analyzed and found to be formed of a nested sets of jets within jets. The analysis of the jet trapping time statistics shows a quantitative agreement with the observed transport exponent.Comment: 17 pages, 17 figure