Paper detail

Conformal invariance in three-dimensional rotating turbulence

We examine three--dimensional turbulent flows in the presence of solid-body rotation and helical forcing in the framework of stochastic Schramm-Löwner evolution curves (SLE). The data stems from a run on a grid of $1536^3$ points, with Reynolds and Rossby numbers of respectively 5100 and 0.06. We average the parallel component of the vorticity in the direction parallel to that of rotation, and examine the resulting $<ω_\textrm{z}>_\textrm{z}$ field for scaling properties of its zero-value contours. We find for the first time for three-dimensional fluid turbulence evidence of nodal curves being conformal invariant, belonging to a SLE class with associated Brownian diffusivity $κ=3.6\pm 0.1$. SLE behavior is related to the self-similarity of the direct cascade of energy to small scales in this flow, and to the partial bi-dimensionalization of the flow because of rotation. We recover the value of $κ$ with a heuristic argument and show that this value is consistent with several non-trivial SLE predictions.