Lab Home | Phone | Search
Center for Nonlinear Studies  Center for Nonlinear Studies
 Home 
 People 
 Current 
 Affiliates 
 Visitors 
 Students 
 Research 
 ICAM-LANL 
 Publications 
 Conferences 
 Workshops 
 Sponsorship 
 Talks 
 Colloquia 
 Colloquia Archive 
 Seminars 
 Postdoc Seminars Archive 
 Quantum Lunch 
 Quantum Lunch Archive 
 CMS Colloquia 
 Q-Mat Seminars 
 Q-Mat Seminars Archive 
 P/T Colloquia 
 Archive 
 Kac Lectures 
 Kac Fellows 
 Dist. Quant. Lecture 
 Ulam Scholar 
 Colloquia 
 
 Jobs 
 Postdocs 
 CNLS Fellowship Application 
 Students 
 Student Program 
 Visitors 
 Description 
 Past Visitors 
 Services 
 General 
 
 History of CNLS 
 
 Maps, Directions 
 CNLS Office 
 T-Division 
 LANL 
 
Thursday, March 06, 2008
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
CNLS Conference Room (TA-3, Bldg 1690)

Seminar

Large-scale organization of small-scale flow: the examples of 2D turbulence and of Rayleigh-Benard convection.

Antonello Provenzale
Istituto di Scienze dell’Atmosfera e del Clima, Torino, Italy

Small-scale turbulent flows sometimes undergo a self-organization process that generates structure at much larger scale. In some instances, this event is associated with an inverse cascade of an important dynamical quantity, even though other mechanisms can be at work. In this talk I review two different examples, namely (1) the inverse enstrophy cascade that acts in small-scale elliptic patches of two-dimensional turbulence, and (2) the clustering of same-sign thermals and plumes in Rayleigh-Benard convection at moderately large values of the Rayleigh number.

Host: Robert Ecke, T-CNLS