Release Summary
Turbulence—where flows and vortices intricately intertwine—is a fundamental phenomenon found across nature, from our everyday surroundings to the cosmos. In particular, high-temperature fusion plasmas exhibit highly complex turbulence, driven by the coupled fluctuations of multiple physical quantities such as density, temperature, and magnetic fields.
A research team led by Dr Go Yatomi of the National Institute for Fusion Science (a graduate student at SOKENDAI at the time of submission) and Associate Professor Motoki Nakata of Komazawa University (also a visiting researcher at RIKEN) has developed a novel method to analyze turbulent states and interactions from the perspective of "information," drawing inspiration from mathematical frameworks in quantum mechanics, such as information entropy.
This approach enables the discovery of previously overlooked turbulence regimes in plasmas and reveals essential nonlinear interactions between multi-scale vortices and flows—interactions that conventional energy-based analyses often miss. The study also proposes potential applications of the method to experimental diagnostics of turbulence and fluctuations.
Looking ahead, this technique is expected to extend beyond plasma physics, offering new insights into complex systems in atmospheric and oceanic sciences, as well as in social dynamics, where complex flows and multi-variable interactions also play critical roles.
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