Taylor rolls on tour: slow drift of turbulent large-scale structures in flows with continuous symmetries

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In Rayleigh–Bénard convection and Taylor–Couette flow cellular patterns emerge at the onset of instability and persist as large-scale coherent structures in the turbulent regime. Their long-term dynamics has been thoroughly characterised and modelled for the case of turbulent convection, whereas turbulent Taylor rolls have received much less attention. Here we present direct numerical simulations of axisymmetric Taylor–Couette flow in the corotating regime and reveal a transition to spatio–temporal chaos as the system size increases. Beyond this transition, Taylor rolls suddenly undergo erratic drifts evolving on a very slow time scale. We estimate an effective diffusion coefficient for the drift and compare the dynamics with analogous motions in Rayleigh–Bénard convection and Poiseuille flow, suggesting that this spontaneous diffusive displacement of large coherent structures is common among different types of wall-bounded turbulent flows.