Turbulence with pressure: anomalous scaling of a passive vector field.

Abstract

The field theoretic renormalization group (RG) and the operator-product expansion are applied to the model of a transverse (divergence-free) vector quantity, passively advected by the "synthetic" turbulent flow with a finite (and not small) correlation time. The vector field is described by the stochastic advection-diffusion equation with the most general form of the inertial nonlinearity; it contains as special cases the kinematic dynamo model, linearized Navier-Stokes (NS) equation, the special model without the stretching term that possesses additional symmetries and has a close formal resemblance with the stochastic NS equation. The statistics of the advecting velocity field is Gaussian, with the energy spectrum E(k) proportional to k(1-epsilon) and the dispersion law omega proportional to k(-2+eta), k being the momentum (wave number). The inertial-range behavior of the model is described by seven regimes (or universality classes) that correspond to nontrivial fixed points of the RG equations and exhibit anomalous scaling. The corresponding anomalous exponents are associated with the critical dimensions of tensor composite operators built solely of the passive vector field, which allows one to construct a regular perturbation expansion in epsilon and eta; the actual calculation is performed to the first order (one-loop approximation), including the anisotropic sectors. Universality of the exponents, their (in)dependence on the forcing, effects of the large-scale anisotropy, compressibility, and pressure are discussed. In particular, for all the scaling regimes the exponents obey a hierarchy related to the degree of anisotropy: the more anisotropic is the contribution of a composite operator to a correlation function, the faster it decays in the inertial range. The relevance of these results for the real developed turbulence described by the stochastic NS equation is discussed.