Forgetfulness of turbulent energy cascade associated with different mechanisms

Abstract The small scales of high Reynolds number turbulence exhibit the statistical universality by forgetting about the large scales during the energy cascade. In this study, we revisit this schematic description with an information-theoretic point of view. Our objective is to understand the importance of different cascade mechanisms in this process. To this end, we compute the “information flux”, the information-theoretic measure of causality formulated by one of the authors, of the decomposed inter-scale energy transfer. For the kinetics, the ratio of the inertial-range inter-scale energy transfer between the strain self-amplification (SSA) and the vortex stretching (VS) mechanisms is 5 : 3. However, for the information-flux, the VS contribution is roughly twice as large as the SSA. We also find several deviations between the kinetics and the informatics, highlighting the nontrivial nature of information distributed among different scales and mechanics in turbulence. This result infers that the SSA is a less efficient mechanism than the VS in terms of information transfer, and contributes to losing the large-scale information.