Physical Review Letter on turbulence

Our scientist Rainer Grauer was involved in the development of a new approach to describe turbulence mathematically, together with his student Sumeja Bureković and long-term collaborator Tobias Schäfer (City University of New York).

In particular, irregular fluctuations, so-called intermittency, which cannot be described with a normal Gaussian distribution, are addressed.
They developed an approach using instantons - represent the probabilities of turbulence as a spatio-temporal path integral. This method allows for the first time to describe and calculate isolated and localized fluctuations, which is a major step in solving one of the big open questions in classical physics.

The full publication can be found here:

S. Bureković, T. Schäfer, R. Grauer „Instantons, Fluctuations, and Singularities in the Supercritical Stochastic Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation“

See also the news article on our faculty’s webpage here

Image: Instantones with smaller and larger localized fluctuation.