Local estimates of Hölder exponents in turbulent vector fields.

It is still not known whether solutions to the Navier-Stokes equation can develop singularities from regular initial conditions. In particular, a classical and unsolved problem is to prove that the velocity field is Hölder continuous with some exponent h<1 (i.e., not necessarily differentiable) at small scales. Different methods have already been proposed to explore the regularity properties of the velocity field and the estimate of its Hölder exponent h. A first method is to detect potential singularities via extrema of an "inertial" dissipation D*=lim&#95;{ℓ→0}D&#95;{ℓ}^{I} that is independent of viscosity [Duchon and Robert, Nonlinearity 13, 249 (2000)0951-771510.1088/0951-7715/13/1/312]. Another possibility is to use the concept of multifractal analysis that provides fractal dimensions of the subspace of exponents h. However, the multifractal analysis is a global statistical method that only provides global information about local Hölder exponents, via their probability of occurrence. In order to explore the local regularity properties of a velocity field, we have developed a local statistical analysis that estimates locally the Hölder continuity. We have compared outcomes of our analysis with results using the inertial energy dissipation D&#95;{ℓ}^{I}. We observe that the dissipation term indeed gets bigger for velocity fields that are less regular according to our estimates. The exact spatial distribution of the local Hölder exponents however shows nontrivial behavior and does not exactly match the distribution of the inertial dissipation.