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Generalized description of intermittency in turbulence via stochastic methods

We present a generalized picture of intermittency in turbulence that is based on the theory of stochastic processes. To this end, we rely on the experimentally and numerically verified finding by R.~Friedrich and J.~Peinke [Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 863 (1997)] that allows for an interpretation of the turbulent energy cascade as a Markov process of the velocity increments in scale. It is explicitly shown that all known phenomenological models of turbulence can be reproduced by the Kramers-Moyal expansion of the velocity increment probability density function that is associated to a Markov process. We compare the different sets of Kramers-Moyal coefficients of each phenomenology and deduce that an accurate description of intermittency should take into account an infinite number of coefficients. This is demonstrated in more detail for the case of Burgers turbulence that exhibits the strongest intermittency effects. Moreover, the influence of nonlocality on the Kramers-Moyal coefficients is investigated by direct numerical simulations of a generalized Burgers equation. Depending on the balance between nonlinearity and nonlocality, we encounter different intermittency behaviour that ranges from self-similarity (purely nonlocal case) to intermittent behaviour (intermediate case that agrees with Yakhot's mean field theory [Phys. Rev. E 63 026307 (2001)]) to shock-like behaviour (purely nonlinear Burgers case).