05.03.2025 (Wednesday)

Duality of Decaying Turbulence to a Solvable String Theory

Regular Seminar Alexander Migdal (IAS)

at:
13:30 IC
room H503
abstract:

We propose a novel analytical framework for incompressible Navier-Stokes (NS) turbulence, revealing a duality between classical fluid dynamics and one-dimensional nonlinear dynamics in loop space. This reformulation leads to a universal momentum loop equation, which excludes finite-time blow-ups, establishing a \textit{No Explosion Theorem} for turbulent flows with finite initial noise. Decaying turbulence emerges as a solution to this equation and is interpreted as a solvable string theory with a discrete target space composed of regular star polygons. The derived decay spectrum exhibits excellent agreement with experimental data and direct numerical simulations (DNS), replacing classical Kolmogorov scaling laws with universal functions derived from number theory. These results suggest a deeper mathematical structure underlying turbulence, uniting fluid dynamics, quantum mechanics, and number theory.