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American Institute of Physics, Physics of Fluids, 9(26), p. 096605

DOI: 10.1063/1.4895131

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Inverse cascade and symmetry breaking in rapidly rotating Boussinesq convection

Journal article published in 2014 by Benjamin Favier ORCID, Lara J. Silvers, Michael R. E. Proctor
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

In this paper we present numerical simulations of rapidly-rotating Rayleigh-Bénard convection in the Boussinesq approximation with stress-free boundary conditions. At moderately low Rossby number and large Rayleigh number, we show that a large-scale depth-invariant flow is formed, reminiscent of the condensate state observed in two-dimensional flows. We show that the large-scale circulation shares many similarities with the so-called vortex, or slow-mode, of forced rotating turbulence. Our investigations show that at a fixed rotation rate the large-scale vortex is only observed for a finite range of Rayleigh numbers, as the quasi-two-dimensional nature of the flow disappears at very high Rayleigh numbers. We observe slow vortex merging events and find a non-local inverse cascade of energy in addition to the regular direct cascade associated with fast small-scale turbulent motions. Finally, we show that cyclonic structures are dominant in the small-scale turbulent flow and this symmetry breaking persists in the large-scale vortex motion. ; Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in Physics of Fluids