Nigel Goldenfeld, Nicholas Guttenberg, Gustavo Gioia
Published 2009-06-19, updated 2010-03-10Version 5
We argue that the transition to turbulence is controlled by large amplitude events that follow extreme distribution theory. The theory suggests an explanation for recent observations of the turbulent state lifetime which exhibit super-exponential scaling behaviour with Reynolds number.
Comments: Change log: Universality of c2/c1 argument has been removed, scaling with size of puff added. To appear in Phys. Rev. E Rapid Communications.
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