Duality of Decaying Turbulence to a Solvable String Theory

Explore a physics lecture where Alexander Migdal presents groundbreaking research on the duality between decaying turbulence and string theory at the Institute for Advanced Study. Delve into a novel reformulation of the Navier-Stokes equations as a nonlinear equation for momentum loops, effectively reducing a three-dimensional partial differential equation to a one-dimensional problem. Learn about the explicit analytical solution called the Euler ensemble, which describes the universal asymptotic state of decaying turbulence and has been validated through numerical simulations and experiments. Discover how this Euler ensemble is equivalent to a string theory with discrete target space given by regular star polygons with additional Ising degrees of freedom, and understand how the Wilson loop for turbulence reduces to a dual amplitude of this string theory with distributed external momentum.