Adventures in 2D turbulence: topology, transfer and dynamics

Robert Ecke
Los Alamos National Laboratory

Fluid turbulence in two dimensions has some unusual and fascinating properties and is amenable to both physical experiment and numerical simulation on a detailed level. I will show how experiments on 2D turbulence can be used to directly understand how structures in the flow are related to a direct measure of transfer quantities in the inertial ranges of the direct and inverse cascades of 2D turbulence. Further, I will show how measurement of Lagrangian quantities such as mean-square particle separation can be obtained and will present an interpretation of these results compared to theoretical predictions.