Global magnitude fluctuations in turbulence

What is it about?

Turbulence is usually of concern to airplane voyagers. But it can shake not only planes, but also smaller vehicles and —at an even smaller scale— clothes inside a washing machine. In experiments in air or water, its effects can be measured and quantified using the stirrers that sustain the flow as measurement instruments. In this way, some interesting properties obeying simple laws can be unveiled; showing that even from what appears to be total disorder some new rules can be extracted.

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Why is it important?

The emergence of a global process having Gaussian statistics in a system where fluctuations of nearly every global magnitude seemed strongly non-Gaussian and non-symmetric is pretty surprising. But a really unexpected finding is that such process --the flow’s global rotation--, is essentially a 1D superdiffusion, like the motion of a single particle in a line undergoing knocks of random amplitude at random times from each side, that moves away from the starting point a bit faster than expected.