Why Does Classical Turbulence Obey an Area Law?
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866908983092051968 |
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| author | Itani, Wael |
| author_facet | Itani, Wael |
| contents | In incompressible flow the viscous force is solenoidal, whereas the Madelung transform of a spinless Schrödinger equation produces only gradient forces. The two are orthogonal, so viscosity cannot arise from Hamiltonian quantum mechanics alone; an open quantum treatment is required. Reducing the $N$-body density matrix to its one-body component and closing the dynamics via Born-Markov yields Lindblad jump operators with $k^2$ scattering rates, which we unravel via quantum state diffusion (QSD) into a norm-preserving stochastic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Dissipation and stochastic forcing are not separate ingredients: both come from the same Lindblad operators, and their amplitudes are locked by the QSD structure. The Madelung transform of this equation, under incompressibility, gives a stochastic Navier-Stokes equation whose viscosity is set by the mean free path and whose noise correlator satisfies the fluctuation-dissipation relation by construction, in agreement with the Landau-Lifshitz framework. The recovery is conditional: the viscous identification holds at the ensemble level via the vortex decomposition of the velocity field; the single-trajectory identification remains open. The zeros of the wavefunction carry quantised circulation; their codimension-2 topology yields the Migdal area law for circulation statistics under a Poisson assumption, here through a different mechanism than the loop-functional saddle point and verified numerically even in the quantum regime where the de~Broglie length exceeds the Kolmogorov scale. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_19173 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Why Does Classical Turbulence Obey an Area Law? Itani, Wael Fluid Dynamics Quantum Physics In incompressible flow the viscous force is solenoidal, whereas the Madelung transform of a spinless Schrödinger equation produces only gradient forces. The two are orthogonal, so viscosity cannot arise from Hamiltonian quantum mechanics alone; an open quantum treatment is required. Reducing the $N$-body density matrix to its one-body component and closing the dynamics via Born-Markov yields Lindblad jump operators with $k^2$ scattering rates, which we unravel via quantum state diffusion (QSD) into a norm-preserving stochastic nonlinear Schrödinger equation. Dissipation and stochastic forcing are not separate ingredients: both come from the same Lindblad operators, and their amplitudes are locked by the QSD structure. The Madelung transform of this equation, under incompressibility, gives a stochastic Navier-Stokes equation whose viscosity is set by the mean free path and whose noise correlator satisfies the fluctuation-dissipation relation by construction, in agreement with the Landau-Lifshitz framework. The recovery is conditional: the viscous identification holds at the ensemble level via the vortex decomposition of the velocity field; the single-trajectory identification remains open. The zeros of the wavefunction carry quantised circulation; their codimension-2 topology yields the Migdal area law for circulation statistics under a Poisson assumption, here through a different mechanism than the loop-functional saddle point and verified numerically even in the quantum regime where the de~Broglie length exceeds the Kolmogorov scale. |
| title | Why Does Classical Turbulence Obey an Area Law? |
| topic | Fluid Dynamics Quantum Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19173 |