Strong effect of weak diffusion on scalar turbulence at large scales

Passive scalar turbulence forced steadily is characterized by the velocity correlation scale, $L$, injection scale, $l$, and diffusive scale, $r_d$. The scales are well separated if the diffusivity is small, $r_d\ll l,L$, and one normally says that effects of diffusion are confined to smaller scales, $r\ll r_d$. However, if the velocity is single scale one finds that a weak dependence of the scalar correlations on the molecular diffusivity persists to even larger scales, e.g. $l\gg r\gg r_d$ \cite{95BCKL}. We consider the case of $L\gg l$ and report a counter-intuitive result -- the emergence of a new range of large scales, $L\gg r\gg l^2/r_d$, where the diffusivity shows a strong effect on scalar correlations.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, submitted to Physics of Fluid

Three-point correlation function of a scalar mixed by an almost smooth random velocity field

We demonstrate that if the exponent $\gamma$ that measures non-smoothness of the velocity field is small then the isotropic zero modes of the scalar's triple correlation function have the scaling exponents proportional to $\sqrt{\gamma}$. Therefore, zero modes are subleading with respect to the forced solution that has normal scaling with the exponent $\gamma$.Comment: 13 pages, RevTeX 3.

Anomalous scaling in two and three dimensions for a passive vector field advected by a turbulent flow

A model of the passive vector field advected by the uncorrelated in time Gaussian velocity with power-like covariance is studied by means of the renormalization group and the operator product expansion. The structure functions of the admixture demonstrate essential power-like dependence on the external scale in the inertial range (the case of an anomalous scaling). The method of finding of independent tensor invariants in the cases of two and three dimensions is proposed to eliminate linear dependencies between the operators entering into the operator product expansions of the structure functions. The constructed operator bases, which include the powers of the dissipation operator and the enstrophy operator, provide the possibility to calculate the exponents of the anomalous scaling.Comment: 9 pages, LaTeX2e(iopart.sty), submitted to J. Phys. A: Math. Ge

Inverse turbulent cascades and conformally invariant curves

We offer a new example of conformal invariance far from equilibrium -- the inverse cascade of Surface Quasi-Geostrophic (SQG) turbulence. We show that temperature isolines are statistically equivalent to curves that can be mapped into a one-dimensional Brownian walk (called Schramm-Loewner Evolution or SLE$_\kappa$). The diffusivity is close to $\kappa=4$, that is iso-temperature curves belong to the same universality class as domain walls in the O(2) spin model. Several statistics of temperature clusters and isolines are measured and shown to be consistent with the theoretical expectations for such a spin system at criticality. We also show that the direct cascade in two-dimensional Navier-Stokes turbulence is not conformal invariant. The emerging picture is that conformal invariance may be expected for inverse turbulent cascades of strongly interacting systems.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure