Transient turbulent bursting in enclosed flows

The origin and the transition to turbulence in wall-bounded shear flows is one of the outstanding problems of classical physics. In order to shed light on this transition, recent investigations have analyzed the decay of localized turbulent structures. At low Reynolds numbers, an exponential distribution of survival times has been observed in pipe and plane Couette flows [1, 2, 3, 4]. In phase space this is related to the decay from a chaotic saddle. However, pipe flow is an open flow, posing many experimental and numerical challenges for the study of bifurcation events. In a closed system we have found a flow state that shows transient turbulent behavior also at low Reynolds numbers. It appears as turbulent bursting in the Taylor-Couette system without an external forcing for counter-rotating cylinders above the centrifugal instability. Therefore it competes with coherent states of the system. Here we present spatiotemporal properties and lifetime behavior of this flow.