Turbulence and Stochastic Processes

Abstract

sec:08-1In 1931 the monograph Analytical Methods in Probability Theory appeared, in which A.N. Kolmogorov laid the foundations for the modern theory of Markov processes [1]. According to Gnedenko: “In the history of probability theory it is difficult to find other works that changed the established points of view and basic trends in research work in such a decisive way”. Ten years later, his article on fully developed turbulence provided the framework within which most, if not all, of the subsequent theoretical investigations have been conducted [2] (see e.g. the review by Biferale et al. in this volume [3]. Remarkably, the greatest advances made in the last few years towards a thorough understanding of turbulence developed from the successful marriage between the theory of stochastic processes and the phenomenology of turbulent transport of scalar fields. In this article we will summarize these recent developments which expose the direct link between the intermittency of transported fields and the statistical properties of particle trajectories advected by the turbulent flow (see also [4], and, for a more thorough review, [5]. We also discuss the perspectives of the Lagrangian approach beyond passive scalars, especially for the modeling of hydrodynamic turbulence.