Organizers: Sujit Datta and Howard Stone

This workshop is a new iteration of a previous, highly successful Princeton Center for Theoretical Science (PCTS) workshop on Elastic Turbulence in Spring 2018. Elastic turbulence is a chaotic, strongly fluctuating regime of a fluid flow, which, amazingly, occurs at low Reynolds number; the topic remains exciting, timely, and is studied by leading researchers around the world. This phenomenon, observed in polymer solutions, is driven by the strong coupling between the fluid flow and its elasticity at sufficiently strong forcing. The statistical features of the flow in this regime have been suggested to be universal, insensitive to the details of the
viscoelastic fluid. As such, it may even be relevant as a source of chaos in flows of living organisms on microscopic scales, if the latter exhibit elastic stresses, which would likely be tied to naturally occurring polymers.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together theorists and experimentalists to discuss problems related to viscoelastic flow instabilities; assess successes as well as examples of lack of predictability in current theory, models and simulations; identify theoretical pathways linking tools of statistical and polymer physics to mean field models of the flows; and highlight applications of these instabilities. The ultimate goal is to bring this community together and clarify unifying/open questions for future research to address.

FOLLOW-UP: The discussions in the workshop were so stimulating that we decided to write a review/perspectives article on the subject with all the speakers.

And it just came out: https://journals.aps.org/prfluids/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.7.080701