Warwick Turbulence Symposium: About

Turbulence is important, challenging and exciting. Turbulence is everywhere.
It is a major factor in weather and climate systems, it greatly affects aviation and sea navigation, it causes formation of protogalactic magnetic fields and it affects plasma confinement in thermonuclear devices. It is important and widespread, and yet it remains the greatest mystery for the scientists who try to describe it even in simple fluids, like water, because simple fluids are easier to drink than to understand. Even after significant advances by a series of great scientists, turbulence remains largely a phenomenological science with only a few exact results obtained over the years. The recent resurgence of interest in turbulence among mathematicians and physicists worldwide is related to the discovery of several new tractable turbulence models in different applications: for example, the turbulent mixing of passive tracers, stochastic fields of water waves and a random set of weak shocks described by the Burgers equation. Although they differ at first sight, all such non-equilibrium statistical systems possess a universal property that allows them to be classified as turbulent, namely the cascades of conserved quantities through phase (e.g. Fourier) space. This property allows a common approach to describing physical systems across a vast range of scales, from quantum to cosmological, e.g. turbulence in superfluids, planetary oceans and atmospheres, solar wind and the interstellar medium. It also allows the application to turbulence of methods developed for other non-equilibrium statistical fields. One of the remaining open challenges for mathematicians, important for understanding energy dissipation in turbulence, is the existence (or non-existence) of singularities in the Navier-Stokes and Euler equations.

Main goals.
Turbulence is a very exciting and active subject that involves many specialists working on specific turbulence problems arising across disciplines. But the approaches of mathematicians, physicists and engineers are often quite diverse, reflecting historical developments in each of these subjects, and overcoming the fragmentation of turbulence research is itself an important and challenging task. A major goal of the proposed symposium is to promote interaction among researchers in turbulence with backgrounds in different disciplines by encouraging the exchange of ideas, collaboration among the leading experts in the field and by transfer of knowledge between these experts, junior scientists and postgraduate students. During the symposium, we will aim to report and access recent theoretical advances and to encourage further work and collaboration in using modern techniques for solving turbulence models.

Main themes include:

A. Singularities, coherent structures and their role in intermittent turbulence.

B. Environmental and Geophysical Turbulence: new approaches in theoretical and numerical  modeling.

C. Kolmogorov-type cascades, entrophy production and intermittency in non-equilibrium statistical systems  such as stochastic wave fields, passive scalars and cluster-cluster aggregation.

D. Dynamical Systems in Fluid Dynamics and Turbulence.

E. Quantum and Cosmological Turbulence.

F. MHD turbulence.

A detailed discussion of these themes can be found in the description of corresponding workshops.