High-gravity water waves
Image: What might look like jelly being stirred is actually water subjected to 20 times normal Earth gravity within ESA’s Large Diameter Centrifuge – as part of an experiment giving new insight into the behavior of wave turbulence.This research, led by Stéphane Dorbolo of University of Liège and Eric Falcon of CNRS and University of Paris, has been published in the prestigious Physical Review Letters.Wave turbulence occurs anywhere where a set of random waves interact with each other – from the ocean to the atmosphere, or in plasmas – but the exact mechanisms behind it are only dimly understood. For surface waves on a liquid, gravity dominates the behavior at low frequencies, while ‘capillary action’ based on surface tension becomes more important at high frequencies.To increase the range of frequencies where waves are dominated by gravity, the researchers conducted their experiment in the ESA’s Large Diameter Centrifuge (LDC) where they...