Anomalous diffusion in fast cellular flows

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Gautam Iyer, Carnegie Mellon

In '53, GI Taylor estimated the effective dispersion rate of a solute diffusing in the presence of a laminar flow in a pipe. It turns out that the length scales involved in typical pipes are too short for Taylor's result to apply. The goal of my talk will be to establish a preliminary estimate for the effective dispersion rate in a model problem at time scales much shorter than those required in Taylor's result. Precisely, I will study a diffusive tracer in the presence of a fast cellular flow. The main result (joint with A. Novikov) shows that the variance at intermediate time scales is of order t. This was conjectured by W. Young, and is consistent with an anomalous diffusive behaviour.