Restricted Partition Functions and Inverse Energy Cascades in Parity Symmetry Breaking flows

Abstract

When the symmetries of homogenous isotropic turbulent flows are broken, different sets of modes with different physical roles emerge. In particular, choosing a forcing which puts more weight on one or the other of these sets may result in different statistics for the energy transfers. We use the general method of computing a partition function restricted to a portion of phase space to study analytically these different statistics. We illustrate this method in the case of parity symmetry breaking, measured by helicity. It is shown that when helicity is sign definite at all scales, an inverse cascade is expected for the energy. When sign-definiteness is lost, even for a small set of modes, this cascade disappears and there is a sharp phase transition to the standard helical equipartition spectra.