Confined vortex surface and irreversibility. 1. Properties of exact solution

We revise the steady vortex surface theory following the recent finding of asymmetric vortex sheets (Migdal, 2021). These surfaces avoid the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability by adjusting their discontinuity and shape. The vorticity collapses to the sheet only in an exceptional case considered long ago by Burgers and Townsend, where it decays as a Gaussian on both sides of the sheet. In generic asymmetric vortex sheets (Shariff, 2021), vorticity leaks to one side or another, making such sheets inadequate for vortex sheet statistics and anomalous dissipation. We conjecture that the vorticity in a turbulent flow collapses on a special kind of surface (confined vortex surface or CVS), satisfying some equations involving the tangent components of the local strain tensor.

The most important qualitative observation is that the inequality needed for this solution’s stability breaks the Euler dynamics’ time reversibility. We interpret this as dynamic irreversibility. We have also represented the enstrophy as a surface integral, conserved in the Navier–Stokes equation in the turbulent limit, with vortex stretching and viscous diffusion terms exactly canceling each other on the CVS surfaces.

We have studied the CVS equations for the cylindrical vortex surface for an arbitrary constant background strain with two different eigenvalues. This equation reduces to a particular version of the stationary Birkhoff–Rott equation for the 2D flow with an extra nonanalytic term. We study some general properties of this equation and reduce its solution to a fixed point of a map on a sphere, guaranteed to exist by the Brouwer theorem.