Prof. Gregory Falkovich

The group studies turbulence and the statistical physics of systems driven far from equilibrium. Turbulent flows resist a closed mathematical description: energy injected at one scale cascades across a wide range of scales before dissipating, producing fluctuations that are strongly intermittent and irreducibly statistical. The aim is to identify the universal laws governing these fluctuations, to characterize the statistics of velocity and of passive quantities such as temperature or pollutants advected by the flow, and to understand how conservation laws and symmetries are broken or restored in the turbulent state.

This work matters because turbulence is the generic state of fluids in nature and technology, from the atmosphere and oceans to astrophysical plasmas and industrial flows, yet it remains one of the central unsolved problems of classical physics. By treating turbulence within the broader framework of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, the group connects fluid mechanics to questions about entropy production, fluctuation relations, and the emergence of large-scale coherent structures, seeking exact results and controlled limits that can anchor an otherwise phenomenological field.