Circulation fluctuations of elementary turbulent vortices.

Authors

Luca Moriconi, Rodrigo M Pereira

Published in

Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences. Volume 384. Issue 2325. Jul 30, 2026.

Abstract

Thin vortex tubes, with core sizes within the dissipation range, are profuse in a homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow. Their intersections with an arbitrary plane define, as a mathematical construct, a dilute gas of localized, intermittently distributed, two-dimensional vortex spots. While their planar density fluctuations are described by a field-theoretical extension of lognormal single-point statistics, known as Gaussian multiplicative chaos (GMC), they carry circulations which are Gaussian-correlated throughout the inertial range. It is puzzling, then, to find that the circulations of individual vortices are fat-tailed distributed, an apparent paradox that we fix within the GMC framework. The solution, validated through the examination of direct numerical simulation data for a broad range of Reynolds numbers, unveils, as a surprising phenomenological result, an existing coupling between the circulation of vortex structures and the short-distance properties of their spatial distribution fluctuations at sub-Taylor microscales. This article is part of the theme issue 'Frontiers of turbulence and statistical physics'.

PMID:
42531305
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 31 Jul 2026.

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