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Updated: May 16, 2026

The Diffusion of Passive Tracers in Laminar Shear Flow
Published on: May 1, 2018
Impact of chaos and Brownian diffusion on irreversibility in Stokes flows
P Sundararajan1, J D Kirtland, D L Koch
1Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853, USA.
Abstract:
We study a reversal process in Stokes flows in the presence of weak diffusion in order to clarify the distinct effects that chaotic flows have on the loss of reversibility relative to nonchaotic flows. In all linear flows, including a representation of the baker's map, we show that the decay of reversibility presents universal properties. In nonlinear chaotic and nonchaotic flows, we show that this universality breaks down due to the distribution of strain rates. In the limit of infinitesimal diffusivity, we predict qualitatively distinct behavior in the chaotic case.
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