A Harris theorem for enhanced dissipation, and an example of Pierrehumbert

Abstract

In many situations, the combined effect of advection and diffusion greatly increases the rate of convergence to equilibrium -- a phenomenon known as enhanced dissipation. Here we study the situation where the advecting velocity field generates a random dynamical system satisfying certain Harris conditions. If $\kappa$ denotes the strength of the diffusion, then we show that with probability at least $1 - o(\kappa^N)$ enhanced dissipation occurs on time scales of order $|\ln \kappa|$, a bound which is known to be optimal. Moreover, on long time scales, we show that the rate of convergence to equilibrium is almost surely independent of diffusivity. As a consequence we obtain enhanced dissipation for the randomly shifted alternating shears introduced by Pierrehumbert '94.