Experimental evidence of conformal invariance in soap film turbulent flows

Abstract

We present experimental evidence of statistical conformal invariance in isocontours of fluid thickness in experiments of two-dimensional turbulence using soap films. A Schlieren technique is used to visualize regions of the flow with constant film thickness, and association of isocontours with Schramm-L\"owner evolution (SLE) is used to identify conformal invariance. In experiments where an inverse energy cascade develops, statistical evidence is consistent with such an association. The diffusivity of the associated one-dimensional Brownian process is close to 8/3, a value previously identified in isocontours of vorticity in high-resolution numerical simulations of two-dimensional turbulence (D. Bernard et al., Nature Phys. 2, 124, 2006). In experiments where the inverse energy cascade is not sufficiently developed, no statistical evidence of conformal invariance is found.