Turbulence, transport and shear flows in fluids and magnetized plasmas

The project will be concerned with non-linear transport and self-sustained shear flows driven by unstably stratified fluids and magnetized plasmas. In particular we will identify and study the different physical mechanisms for shear flow generation, compr ising electrostatic, electromagnetic and magnetic field curvature induced sources, and investigate their interaction with the ambient spatial fluctuations. The transition to turbulence and transport scaling will be studied by the use of two- and three-dimensional fluid simulations as well as analytical calculations. Much emphasis will be devoted towards advanced diagnostics and signal analysis of data from n umerical simulations as well as experiments. The theoretical results will be compared to data from basic laboratory experiments, magnetic confinement experiments and observations during ionospheric irregularities. These efforts are likely to explain the fluctuation characteristics and give deeper in sight to the self-organization and intermittency universally observed in convective systems.