Speaker: Jun Nian (ICTP-AP)
Title: Two-dimensional Turbulence and Conformal Field Theories
Abstract: Two-dimensional Navier-Stokes turbulence is a fascinating problem. Despite its chaotic nature, its spectrum has very simple scalings (k^(-5/3) and k^(-3)) in a particular range, which strongly suggests an underlying quantum conformal field theory (CFT) description. Polyakov has studied this problem and proposed a non-unitary (21, 2) minimal model as the preliminary CFT candidate. Later, despite many numerical and theoretical attempts, none of the CFT approaches simultaneously reproduced the precise scalings and cascade directions. In a recent work arXiv:2210.06762, my collaborators and I resolve this long-standing problem of finding the correct non-unitary CFT description for the 2d turbulence in the inertial range, which produces the precise scalings, the directions of two cascades and also the fractal dimensions in a unified picture. We also made some new predictions for future numerical simulations and experiments to test. In this talk, I will discuss this work in detail.
Date & Time: 3:00 PM, Dec 22, 2022.
Video: Link