Chaotic and regular instantons in helical shell models of turbulence

Shell models of turbulence have a finite-time blowup, i.e. the enstrophy diverges while the single shell velocities stay finite, in the inviscid limit. The signature of this blowup is represented by self-similar instantonic structures traveling coherently through the inertial range. These solutions might influence the energy transfer and the anomalous scaling properties empirically observed for the forced and viscous models. In this paper we present a study of the instantonic solutions for a class of shell-models of turbulence based on the exact decomposition of the Navier-Stokes equations in helical eigenstates. We found that depending on the helical structure of the shell interactions instantons are chaotic or regular. Some instantonic solutions tend to recover mirror symmetry for scales small enough. All models that have anomalous scaling develop regular non-chaotic instantons. Vice-versa, models that have mean field non-anomalous scaling in the stationary regime are those that have chaotic instantons. Finally, the direction of the energy carried by each single instanton tends to coincide with the direction of the energy cascade in the stationary regime. Our findings further support the idea that instantons might be crucial to describe some aspects of the multi-scale anomalous statistics of shell models.