Scientists tackle physics' oldest unsolved problem: ‘It’s rare to see breakthroughs like this’

The natural phenomenon of turbulence has captivated the interest of scientists for centuries but a complete understanding of its chaotic pattern and structure has been elusive. Even with extremely powerful modern supercomputers “anything beyond the simplest turbulent flows is too chaotic and multiscaled to be directly simulatable.”

However, an international group of researchers has developed a new approach which treats turbulence probabilistically achieving a significant reduction in the use of memory and computation allowing for accurate modeling of turbulent flows and other chaotic systems on a laptop computer. Their findings were published recently in the journal Science Advances which could have several practical applications for engineering cars and planes, medical devices and weather prediction.

Researchers make breakthrough by simulating a quantum system

“Despite the simple and deterministic physical laws governing it, turbulence remains an inherently complex and chaotic phenomenon,” inform the study’s authors. This is due to the large number of eddies of varying sizes “interacting in intricate and nonlinear ways across wide ranges of spatial and temporal scales, leading to the emergence of chaos.”

To complicate matters further, other nonlinearities and scales may be introduced to turbulent flows through multiple chemical reactions. The chaos inherent makes it impossible to accurately predict the dynamics of the flow over long periods of time and the flow fields’ multiscaled nature makes creating simulations incredibly expensive.

In order to solve this problem, the researchers employed a mathematical tool called tensor networks. These algorithms simulate a quantum system, whose “structure can be exploited to compress the states into approximate, but highly accurate, polynomially large representations.”

The new technique uses a million times less memory and calculations are one thousand times faster according to the scientists.

Nik Gourianov, the study’s lead author and researcher in the department of physics at the University of Oxford told CNN that “turbulence was and still is an unsolved problem in the sense that we cannot exactly simulate realistic flows on computers.” He explained that wind tunnels will still be needed when designing things such as an aircraft wing. However he added that “advances such as ours ‘chip away’ at the problem and push the frontier.”

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