Drift, diffusion and divergence

Abstract

Turbulent Taylor-Couette flow displays traces of axisymmetric Taylor vortices even at high Reynolds numbers. With this motivation, Feldmann & Avila (2025) carry out long-time numerical simulations of axisymmetric high-Reynolds-number Taylor-Couette flow. They find that the Taylor vortices, using the only degree of freedom that remains available to them, carry out Brownian motion in the axial direction, with a diffusion constant that diverges as the number of rolls is reduced below a critical value.

References in corpus (8)

• High Reynolds number Taylor-Couette turbulence
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• Taylor rolls on tour: Slow drift of turbulent large-scale structures in flows with continuous symmetries