Recurrent spatio-temporal structures in presence of continuous symmetries

When statistical assumptions do not hold and coherent structures are present in spatially extended systems such as fluid flows, flame fronts and field theories, a dynamical description of turbulent phenomena becomes necessary. In the dynamical systems approach, theory of turbulence for a given system, with given boundary conditions, is given by (a) the geometry of its infinite-dimensional state space and (b) the associated measure, that is, the likelihood that asymptotic dynamics visits a given state space region. In this thesis this vision is pursued in the context of Kuramoto-Sivashinsky system, one of the simplest physically interesting spatially extended nonlinear systems. With periodic boundary conditions, continuous translational symmetry endows state space with additional structure that often dictates the type of observed solutions. At the same time, the notion of recurrence becomes relative: asymptotic dynamics visits the neighborhood of any equivalent, translated point, infinitely often. Identification of points related by the symmetry group action, termed symmetry reduction, although conceptually simple as the group action is linear, is hard to implement in practice, yet it leads to dramatic simplification of dynamics. Here we propose a scheme, based on the method of moving frames of Cartan, to efficiently project solutions of high-dimensional truncations of partial differential equations computed in the original space to a reduced state space. The procedure simplifies the visualization of high-dimensional flows and provides new insight into the role the unstable manifolds of equilibria and traveling waves play in organizing Kuramoto-Sivashinsky flow. This in turn elucidates the mechanism that creates unstable modulated traveling waves (periodic orbits in reduced space) that provide a skeleton of the dynamics. The compact description of dynamics thus achieved sets the stage for reduction of the dynamics to mappings between a set of Poincare sections.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Cvitanovic, Predrag; Committee Member: Dieci, Luca; Committee Member: Grigoriev, Roman; Committee Member: Schatz, Michael; Committee Member: Wiesenfeld, Kur