Bill Young
Scripps Institution of Oceanography
University of California San Diego
Seminar Information
Engineering Building Unit 2 (EBU2)
Room 479
Seminar Recording Available: Please contact seminar coordinator, Jake Blair at (j1blair@ucsd.edu)
Vortex crystals are quasiregular arrays of like-signed vortices in solid-body rotation embedded within a uniform background of weaker vorticity. Vortex crystals are observed at the poles of Jupiter and in laboratory experiments (many at UCSD) with magnetized electron plasmas. I’ll discuss the formation of vortex crystals from the free evolution of randomly excited two-dimensional turbulence on an idealized polar cap. A successful scaling argument relates the radius of the emergent crystal to the initial energy and the variation of the Coriolis parameter with distance from the planetary pole.
Apart from a three-year interlude as an Assistant Professor at MIT, William Young has been at Scripps Institution of Oceanography since his post-doctoral appointment in 1982. His current interests include ocean surface wave dynamics and icy-moon convection.