HYSTERESIS AND VORTICES DYNAMICS IN A TURBULENT FLOW

Recent results about the slow dynamics present in a fully developed turbulent flow are reported. In a previous paper [de la Torre & Burguete, 2007] we showed that the mean velocity field in a turbulent flow bifurcates subcritically breaking some symmetries of the problem and becomes time-dependent because of equatorial vortices moving with a precession movement. This subcriticality produces a bistable regime, whose main characteristics were successfully reproduced using a three-well potential model with additive noise. In this paper we present the characterization of the hysteresis region, not previously observed, in this bifurcation. This hysteresis appears only for an extremely small range of parameters.