The spiral wind-up of vorticity in an inviscid planar vortex

Abstract

The relaxation of a smooth two-dimensional vortex to axisymmetry, also known as ‘axisymmetrization’, is studied asymptotically and numerically. The vortex is perturbed at t =0 and differential rotation leads to the wind-up of vorticity fluctuations to form a spiral. It is shown that for infinite Reynolds number and in the linear approximation, the vorticity distribution tends to axisymmetry in a weak or coarse-grained sense: when the vorticity field is integrated against a smooth test function the result decays asymptotically as t −λ with λ=1+( n 2 +8) 1/2 , where n is the azimuthal wavenumber of the perturbation and n [ges ]1. The far-field stream function of the perturbation decays with the same exponent. To obtain these results the paper develops a complete asymptotic picture of the linear evolution of vorticity fluctuations for large times t , which is based on that of Lundgren (1982).