Scaling or multiscaling: Varieties of universality in a driven nonlinear model.

Abstract

Physical understanding of how the interplay between symmetries and nonlinear effects can control the scaling and multiscaling properties in a coupled driven system, such as magnetohydrodynamic turbulence or turbulent binary fluid mixtures, remains elusive. To address this generic issue, we construct a conceptual nonlinear hydrodynamic model, parametrized jointly by the nonlinear coefficients, and the spatial scaling of the variances of the advecting stochastic velocity and the stochastic additive driving force, respectively. By using a perturbative one-loop dynamic renormalization group method, we calculate the multiscaling exponents of the suitably defined equal-time structure functions of the dynamical variable. We show that depending upon the control parameters the model can display a variety of universal scaling behaviors ranging from simple scaling to multiscaling.