T. Grafke, R. Grauer and T. Schaefer, European Physics News (Highlight), 43 No. 3 (2013).
Abstract
Understanding intermittency in turbulent systems is still one of the open problems in classical physics. Since intermittency is governed by the non-Gaussianity of rare fluctuations, instantons might offer a way to better understand the behavior of turbulent systems. In the present work we concentrate on rare fluctuations in Burgers turbulence and we address the question whether one can identify instantons in direct numerical simulations of the stochastically driven Burgers equation. This is of special importance since this demonstrates that instantons indeed form the skeleton of rare turbulent fluctuations. For this purpose, we first solve the instanton equations using the Chernykh-Stepanov method [Phys. Rev. E 64, 026306 (2001)]. These results are then compared to direct numerical simulations by introducing a filtering technique to extract prescribed rare events from massive data sets of realizations. Using this approach we can extract the entire time history of the instanton evolution, which allows us to identify the different phases predicted by the direct method of Chernykh and Stepanov with remarkable agreement.