Anomalous diffusion and anomalous stretching in vortical flows

Abstract

The trajectories of particles advected by non-random spatially periodic velocity fields may be chaotic, i.e., extremely sensitive to their initial positions. In the most general case, the area of a cloud of advected particles grows like (time)α where the exponent α ranges between 0 and 2 (shear stretching). These observations could explain many known facts about dispersion processes in shallow tidal seas.