IPMU Colloquium

Speaker: David Spergel (Simons Foundation)
Title: Understanding Compressible MHD Turbulence
Date (JST): Wed, Oct 07, 2026, 15:30 - 17:00
Place: Lecture Hall
Abstract:
The physics of turbulence is a long-standing and still open problem. Most of our understanding of turbulence is for incompressible fluids: the Kolmogorov picture, Obukov-Corrsin-Yaglom theory for tracers, Richardson diffusion and anomalous dissipation. I will begin by reviewing these concepts and then will describe our recent work showing that these ideas can be extended to both compressible fluids and magnetized fluids by reformulating the key equations on the transport landscape: a manifold defined by a metric weighted by density and conductivity. Sources and non-linear tracer physicsare incorporated into the new formalism. This new approach has applications to a wide range of physical systems including understanding the role of turbulence in combustion , fusion, and cosmic ray propagation.