Critical balance in magnetohydrodynamic, rotating and stratified turbulence: towards a universal scaling conjecture

Details Critical balance in magnetohydrodynamic, rotating and stratified turbulence: towards a universal scaling conjecture Critical balance in magnetohydrodynamic, rotating and stratified turbulence: towards a universal scaling conjecture

2009-04-22

arxiv.org/abs/0904.3488v3

J.Fluid Mech.677:134,2011

Physics

Fluid Dynamics

JFM-style tex, 16 pages, 1 figure; replaced with final published version (minor edits)

Scientific paper

10.1017/S002211201100067X

It is proposed that critical balance - a scale-by-scale balance between the linear propagation and nonlinear interaction time scales - can be used as a universal scaling conjecture for determining the spectra of strong turbulence in anisotropic wave systems. Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD), rotating and stratified turbulence are considered under this assumption and, in particular, a novel and experimentally testable energy cascade scenario and a set of scalings of the spectra are proposed for low-Rossby-number rotating turbulence. It is argued that in neutral fluids, the critically balanced anisotropic cascade provides a natural path from strong anisotropy at large scales to isotropic Kolmogorov turbulence at very small scales. It is also argued that the kperp^{-2} spectra seen in recent numerical simulations of low-Rossby-number rotating turbulence may be analogous to the kperp^{-3/2} spectra of the numerical MHD turbulence in the sense that they could be explained by assuming that fluctuations are polarised (aligned) approximately as inertial waves (Alfven waves for MHD).

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