Information-Thermodynamic Bound on Information Flow in Turbulent Cascade

Abstract

We investigate the nature of information flow in turbulence from an information-thermodynamic viewpoint. For the fully developed three-dimensional fluid turbulence described by the fluctuating Navier-Stokes equation, we prove that information of large-scale eddies is transferred to small scales along with the energy cascade. We numerically illustrate our findings using a shell model and further show that in the inertial range, the intensity of the information flow is nearly constant and can be scaled by the large-eddy turnover time. Our numerical results also suggest that the corresponding information-thermodynamic efficiency is quite low compared to other typical information processing systems such as Maxwell's demon. These findings provide a new perspective on how universality and intermittency of turbulent fluctuations emerge at small scales.

18 pages, 5 figures. In ver.5, we have extended the main results. The presentation has also been revised substantially