Braid Entropy of Faraday Waves driven 2D Turbulence

etc15 Tracking Number 61

We report new experimental results that use tools from braid theory to characterize two-dimensional turbulent flows driven by Faraday waves. The average topological length of the material fluid lines is found to grow exponentially with time. It allows us to compute the braid’s topological entropy SBraid. We show that SBraid increases as the square root of the turbulence kinetic energy E ~ u^2, where u^2 is the horizontal velocity variance . At long times, the PDFs of Lbraid are positively skewed and present strong exponential tails.