Anomalous dissipation and regularization in isotropic Gaussian turbulence

Abstract

In this work we rigorously establish a number of properties of "turbulent" solutions to the stochastic transport and the stochastic continuity equations constructed by Le Jan and Raimond in [Ann. Probab. 30(2): 826-873, 2002]. The advecting velocity field, not necessarily incompressible, is Gaussian and white-in-time, space-homogeneous and isotropic, with $\alpha$-H\"older regularity in space, $\alpha\in (0,1)$. We cover the full range of compressibility ratios giving spontaneous stochasticity of particle trajectories. For the stochastic transport equation, we prove that generic $L^2_x$ data experience anomalous dissipation of the mean energy, and study basic properties of the resulting anomalous dissipation measure. Moreover, we show that starting from such irregular data, the solution immediately gains regularity and enters into a fractional Sobolev space $H^{1-\alpha-}_x$. The proof of the latter is obtained as a consequence of a new sharp regularity result for the degenerate parabolic PDE satisfied by the associated two-point self-correlation function, which is of independent interest. In the incompressible case, a Duchon-Robert-type formula for the anomalous dissipation measure is derived, making a precise connection between this self-regularizing effect and a limit on the flux of energy in the turbulent cascade. Finally, for the stochastic continuity equation, we prove that solutions starting from a Dirac delta initial condition undergo an average squared dispersion growing with respect to time as $t^{1/(1-\alpha)}$, rigorously establishing the analogue of Richardson's law of particle separations in fluid dynamics.