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Trinity
College, Cambridge, UK |
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Abstract: Turbulence is 'chiral' when it lacks reflexional symmetry, the simplest measure of chirality being a nonzero helicity. Helicity is generated by thermal or compositional convection in a rotating fluid, when 'up-down' symmetry is broken. When coriolis forces dominate, then for prescribed statistics of the buoyancy field the helicity can be calculated. This leads to the phenomenon of 'skew-diffusion' for an advected passive scalar, and the 'alpha-effect' and associated dynamo action for any ambient magnetic field. This topic will be reviewed and some outstanding problems identified. |
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