Seminar: Exact coherent structures in quasi-2D turbulence: Connecting theory with experiments

Despite the immense progress that was made in recent years in developing a dynamical systems-based description of transitional and weakly turbulent fluid flows, we have barely scratched the surface. Almost every new discovery raises as many new questions as it answers. In this talk we discuss how our recent results for the 2D Kolmogorov flow help address two fundamental issues. First of all, are the exact coherent structures that underlie this formalism, or at least some of their signatures, actually observed in experiment and do they play an important dynamical role? Second, while periodic orbit theory predicts that ECS can be used to compute statistical averages, what is the role ECS play in the dynamics, i.e., how do they fit into the deterministic description of turbulence?