Experimental observation of the geostrophic turbulence regime of rapidly rotating convection

Abstract

The competition between turbulent convection and global rotation in planetary and stellar interiors governs the transport of heat and tracers, as well as magnetic-field generation. These objects operate in dynamical regimes ranging from weakly rotating convection to the `geostrophic turbulence' regime of rapidly rotating convection. However, the latter regime has remained elusive in the laboratory, despite a worldwide effort to design ever-taller rotating convection cells over the last decade. Building on a recent experimental approach where convection is driven radiatively, we report heat transport measurements in quantitative agreement with this scaling regime, the experimental scaling-law being validated against direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the idealized setup. The scaling exponent from both experiments and DNS agrees well with the geostrophic turbulence prediction. The prefactor of the scaling-law is greater than the one diagnosed in previous idealized numerical studies, pointing to an unexpected sensitivity of the heat transport efficiency to the precise distribution of heat sources and sinks, which greatly varies from planets to stars.

References in corpus (14)

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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Rotating convective turbulence in moderate to high Prandtl number fluids
• Reynolds number scaling and energy spectra in geostrophic convection
• Tidal dissipation due to the elliptical instability and turbulent viscosity in convection zones in rotating giant planets and stars
• Velocity-informed upper bounds on the convective heat transport induced by internal heat sources and sinks
• Robust wall modes and their interplay with bulk turbulence in confined rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection
• Bridging the Rossby number gap in rapidly rotating thermal convection
• A direct derivation of the Gent-McWilliams/Redi diffusion tensor from quasi-geostrophic dynamics
• Seven decades of exploring planetary interiors with rotating convection experiments
• Dynamic regimes in planetary cores: τ-{\ell} diagrams
• Statistics of inhomogeneous turbulence in large scale quasi-geostrophic dynamics
• New constraint on Europa's ice shell: magnetic signature from the ocean
• Prandtl number dependence of rotating internally heated convection