Exact Resummations in the Theory of Hydrodynamic Turbulence: I The Ball of Locality and Normal Scaling

Abstract

This paper is the first in a series of three papers that aim at understanding the scaling behaviour of hydrodynamic turbulence. We present in this paper a perturbative theory for the structure functions and the response functions of the hydrodynamic velocity field in real space and time. Starting from the Navier-Stokes equations (at high Reynolds number Re) we show that the standard perturbative expansions that suffer from infra-red divergences can be exactly resummed using the Belinicher-L'vov transformation. After this exact (partial) resummation it is proven that the resulting perturbation theory is free of divergences, both in large and in small spatial separations. The hydrodynamic response and the correlations have contributions that arise from mediated interactions which take place at some space- time coordinates. It is shown that the main contribution arises when these coordinates lie within a shell of a "ball of locality" that is defined and discussed. We argue that the real space-time formalism developed here offers a clear and intuitive understanding of every diagram in the theory, and of every element in the diagrams. One major consequence of this theory is that none of the familiar perturbative mechanisms may ruin the classical Kolmogorov (K41) scaling solution for the structure functions. Accordingly, corrections to the K41 solutions should be sought in nonperturbative effects. These effects are the subjects of papers II and III in this series, that will propose a mechanism for anomalous scaling in turbulence, which in particular allows multiscaling of the structure functions.