Lagrangian acceleration has been investigated both experimentally and numerically in the past, and it has been shown to exhibit extreme fluctuations, which have been rationalized as events in which tracer particles get trapped into vortical structures such as vortex tubes or filaments. Here, we consider the statistics of acceleration within the multifractal framework, as in Biferale et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 064502 (2004), and investigate the statistics of Lagrangian acceleration using shell models of turbulence, as in Boffetta et al., Phys. Rev. E 66, 066307 (2002), that—by construction—do not contain vortical structures. Our analysis reveals that, despite not accounting for specific coherent vortex structures, the multifractal model accurately captures the extreme intermittent fluctuations observed in the acceleration, with predictions that remain robust across a wide range of Reynolds numbers.

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• Intermittency
• Lagrangian dynamics
• Turbulence
• Lagrangian flow field
• Shell model