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A Mazzino

Publications and source records attributed to A Mazzino.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

Influence of helicity on anomalous scaling of a passive scalar advected by the turbulent velocity field with finite correlation time: two-loop approximation.

The influence of helicity on the stability of scaling regimes, on the effective diffusivity, and on the anomalous scaling of structure functions of a passive scalar advected by a Gaussian solenoidal velocity field with finite correlation time is investigated by the field theoretic renormalization group and operator-product expansion within the two-loop approximation. The influence of helicity on the scaling regimes is discussed and shown in the plane of exponents epsilon-eta, where epsilon characterizes the energy spectrum of the velocity field in the inertial range E proportional to k(1-2epsilon), and eta is related to the correlation time at the wave number k, which is scaled as k(-2+eta). The restrictions given by nonzero helicity on the regions with stable fixed points that correspond to the scaling regimes are analyzed in detail. The dependence of the effective diffusivity on the helicity parameter is discussed. The anomalous exponents of the structure functions of the passive scalar field which define their anomalous scaling are calculated and it is shown that, although the separate composite operators which define them strongly depend on the helicity parameter, the resulting two-loop contributions to the critical dimensions of the structure functions are independent of helicity. Details of calculations are shown.

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Anomalous scaling of passively advected magnetic field in the presence of strong anisotropy.

Inertial-range scaling behavior of high-order (up to order N=51 ) two-point correlation functions of a passively advected vector field has been analyzed in the framework of the rapid-change model with strong small-scale anisotropy with the aid of the renormalization group and the operator-product expansion. Exponents of the power-like asymptotic behavior of the correlation functions have been calculated in the one-loop approximation. These exponents are shown to depend on anisotropy parameters in such a way that a specific hierarchy related to the degree of anisotropy is observed. Deviations from power-law behavior like oscillations or logarithmic behavior in the corrections to correlation functions have not been found.

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Multiple-scale analysis and renormalization for preasymptotic scalar transport.

Preasymptotic transport of a scalar quantity passively advected by a velocity field formed by a large-scale component superimposed on a small-scale fluctuation is investigated both analytically and by means of numerical simulations. Exploiting the multiple-scale expansion one arrives at a Fokker-Planck equation which describes the preasymptotic scalar dynamics. This equation is associated with a Langevin equation involving a multiplicative noise and an effective (compressible) drift. For the general case, no explicit expression for either the affective drift on the effective diffusivity (actually a tensorial field) can be obtained. We discuss an approximation under which an explicit expression for the diffusivity (and thus for the drift) can be obtained. Its expression permits us to highlight the important fact that the diffusivity explicitly depends on the large-scale advecting velocity. Finally, the robustness of the aforementioned approximation is checked numerically by means of direct numerical simulations.

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Lorenz-like systems and classical dynamical equations with memory forcing: an alternate point of view for singling out the origin of chaos.

An alternate view for the emergence of chaos in Lorenz-like systems is presented in this paper. For such purpose, the Lorenz problem is reformulated in a classical mechanical form and it turns out to be equivalent to the problem of a damped and forced one-dimensional motion of a particle in a two-well potential, with a forcing term depending on the "memory" of the particle past motion. The dynamics of the original Lorenz system in the proposed particle phase space can then be rewritten in terms of a one-dimensional first-exit-time problem. The emergence of chaos turns out to be due to the discontinuous solutions of the transcendental equation ruling the time for the particle to cross the intermediate potential wall. The whole problem is tackled analytically deriving a piecewise linearized Lorenz-like system that preserves all the essential properties of the original model.

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Passive scalar turbulence in high dimensions.

Exploiting a Lagrangian strategy we present a numerical study for both perturbative and nonperturbative regions of the Kraichnan advection model. The major result is the numerical assessment of the first-order 1/d expansion by Chertkov, Falkovich, Kolokolov, and Lebedev [Phys. Rev. E 52, 4924 (1995)] for the fourth-order scalar structure function in the limit of high dimension d's. In addition to the perturbative results, the behavior of the anomaly for the sixth-order structure functions versus the velocity scaling exponent, xi, is investigated and the resulting behavior is discussed.

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Universality and saturation of intermittency in passive scalar turbulence

The statistical properties of a scalar field advected by the nonintermittent Navier-Stokes flow arising from a two-dimensional inverse energy cascade are investigated. The universality properties of the scalar field are probed by comparing the results obtained with two types of injection mechanisms. Scaling properties are shown to be universal, even though anisotropies injected at large scales persist down to the smallest scales and local isotropy is not fully restored. Scalar statistics is strongly intermittent and scaling exponents saturate to a constant for sufficiently high orders. This is observed also for the advection by a velocity field rapidly changing in time, pointing to the genericity of the phenomenon.

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Persistence of small-scale anisotropies and anomalous scaling in a model of magnetohydrodynamics turbulence

The problem of anomalous scaling in magnetohydrodynamics turbulence is considered within the framework of the kinematic approximation, in the presence of a large-scale background magnetic field. The velocity field is Gaussian, delta-correlated in time, and scales with a positive exponent xi. Explicit inertial-range expressions for the magnetic correlation functions are obtained; they are represented by superpositions of power laws with nonuniversal amplitudes and universal (independent of the anisotropy and forcing) anomalous exponents. The complete set of anomalous exponents for the pair correlation function is found nonperturbatively, in any space dimension d, using the zero-mode technique. For higher-order correlation functions, the anomalous exponents are calculated to O(xi) using the renormalization group. The exponents exhibit a hierarchy related to the degree of anisotropy; the leading contributions to the even correlation functions are given by the exponents from the isotropic shell, in agreement with the idea of restored small-scale isotropy. Conversely, the small-scale anisotropy reveals itself in the odd correlation functions: the skewness factor is slowly decreasing going down to small scales and higher odd dimensionless ratios (hyperskewness, etc.) dramatically increase, thus diverging in the r-->0 limit.

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Manifestation of anisotropy persistence in the hierarchies of magnetohydrodynamical scaling exponents

An example of a turbulent system where the failure of the hypothesis of small-scale isotropy restoration is detectable both in the "flattening" of the inertial-range scaling exponent hierarchy and in the behavior of odd-order dimensionless ratios, e.g., skewness and hyperskewness, is presented. Specifically, within the kinematic approximation in magnetohydrodynamical turbulence, we show that for compressible flows, the isotropic contribution to the scaling of magnetic correlation functions and the first anisotropic ones may become practically indistinguishable. Moreover, the skewness factor now diverges as the Peclet number goes to infinity, a further indication of small-scale anisotropy.

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Passive scalar intermittency in compressible flow.

A compressible generalization of the Kraichnan model [Phys. Rev. Lett. 72, 1016 (1994)] of passive scalar advection is considered. The dynamical role of compressibility on the intermittency of the scalar statistics is investigated for the direct cascade regime. Simple physical arguments suggest that an enhanced intermittency should appear for increasing compressibility, due to the slowing down of Lagrangian trajectory separations. This is confirmed by a numerical study of the dependence of intermittency exponents on the degree of compressibility, by a Lagrangian method for calculating simultaneous N-point tracer correlations.

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Anisotropic nonperturbative zero modes for passively advected magnetic fields.

An analytic assessment of the role of anisotropic corrections to the isotropic anomalous scaling exponents is given for the d-dimensional kinematic magnetohydrodynamics problem in the presence of a mean magnetic field. The velocity advecting the magnetic field changes very rapidly in time and scales with a positive exponent xi. Inertial-range anisotropic contributions to the scaling exponents, zeta(j), of second-order magnetic correlations are associated with zero modes and have been calculated nonperturbatively. For d=3, the limit xi-->0 yields zeta(j)=j-2+xi(2j(3)+j(2)-5j-4)/[2(4j(2)-1)], where j (j>or=2) is the order in the Legendre polynomial decomposition applied to correlation functions. Conjectures on the fact that anisotropic components cannot change the isotropic threshold to the dynamo effect are also made.

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