Scientists found they can basically 'turn off' turbulence just by stopping a few specific ways that water particles bump into each other.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Reduction of Triadic Interactions Suppresses Intermittency and Anomalous Dissipation in Turbulence
arXiv · 2603.19180
The Takeaway
Turbulence is the chaotic, energy-wasting flow seen in everything from air travel to water pipes, and was previously thought to be an unavoidable feature of physics. This study shows that if you systematically prune just a few specific ways that fluid waves interact, the chaos completely disappears and the fluid flows smoothly. It proves that turbulence is not an inherent property of motion, but a result of a fluid having too many ways for its particles to communicate.
From the abstract
We investigate how the defining statistical features of three-dimensional turbulence respond to systematic reductions of the Fourier-space triadic interaction network. Using direct numerical simulations of both fractally and homogeneously decimated Navier-Stokes dynamics, we show that progressive thinning of the set of active modes leads to a systematic suppression of intermittency and, most strikingly, to the vanishing of the mean dissipation rate in the large-Reynolds-number limit. Structure-f