Nonlinear dynamics in fluids is a research area focused on the analysis and prediction of fluid flows governed by nonlinear partial differential equations, such as the Navier–Stokes and Euler equations. It investigates phenomena including hydrodynamic instabilities, transition to turbulence, coherent structures, pattern formation, and spatiotemporal chaos across a wide range of Reynolds numbers. Methods commonly involve asymptotic analysis, bifurcation theory, dynamical systems approaches, numerical simulation, and experimental visualization. The field aims to characterize attractors, energy cascades, and multiscale interactions in laminar, transitional, and turbulent regimes, informing modeling, control, and reduced-order descriptions of complex fluid behavior in both natural and engineered systems.
The ocean is saturated with microplastics. While we know the location of the great garbage patches, where plastic particles may accumulate below the ocean surface remains unknown. The vastness of the ocean means particle ...
Earth Sciences
Dec 9, 2025
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17
University of Queensland researchers have created a microscopic "ocean" on a silicon chip to miniaturize the study of wave dynamics. The device, made at UQ's School of Mathematics and Physics, uses a layer of superfluid helium ...
Soft Matter
Oct 23, 2025
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128
Van Gogh's "The Starry Night" has stirred the souls of art lovers for over a century. Now, its swirling skies may also speak to physicists, as it echoes the patterns of quantum turbulence.
Quantum Physics
Aug 8, 2025
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235
Instead of a tempest in a teapot, imagine the cosmos in a canister. Scientists have performed experiments using nested, spinning cylinders to confirm that an uneven wobble in a ring of electrically conductive fluid like liquid ...
Planetary Sciences
Jul 7, 2025
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75
In the Quantum Mixtures Lab of the National Institute of Optics (Cnr-Ino), a team of researchers from Cnr, the University of Florence and the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy (LENS) observed the phenomenon ...
Quantum Physics
Apr 10, 2025
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861
The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the most prominent interannual climate variability signal, has been widely studied for its teleconnections with Antarctic sea ice variability. However, its influence on the predictability ...
Earth Sciences
Mar 13, 2025
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20
A team led by researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill have made an extraordinary discovery that is reshaping our understanding of bubbles and their movement. Picture tiny air bubbles inside a container filled with liquid. When the ...
General Physics
Feb 25, 2025
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283
Water and oil, and some other simple fluids, respond in the same way to all levels of shear stress. These are termed Newtonian fluids, and their viscosity is constant for all stresses although it will vary with temperature. ...
Soft Matter
Oct 28, 2024
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40
An altogether new convective instability has been predicted and experimentally discovered, 140 years after Lord Rayleigh. Convective instabilities are of fundamental importance for both our everyday life as well as for ecology ...
Microplastics are a global problem: they end up in rivers and oceans, they accumulate in living organisms and disrupt entire ecosystems. How tiny particles behave in a current is difficult to describe scientifically, especially ...
General Physics
Aug 12, 2024
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