Radius-dependent looseness of the far-field Calderón-Zygmund bound in turbulent vortex stretching
Phys. Rev. Fluids 11, 094603 – Published 21 September, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/std4-f34j
Abstract
The far-field contribution to vortex stretching at a high-vorticity point can be bounded by an unsigned Calderón-Zygmund singular-integral estimate. We separate this bound into the quantity it bounds and the quantity it uses to bound it, and measure both by direct summation of the contracted Biot-Savart stretching integral on direct numerical simulation data, as functions of the outer integration radius . Across forced isotropic turbulence at Taylor-scale Reynolds numbers , 611, and 1300, the unsigned capacity—the magnitude the estimate permits—grows approximately logarithmically in , whereas the realized signed magnitude—what the same integral actually delivers—grows with only of the capacity slope. The empirical tightness therefore decreases by over , with block-bootstrap confidence intervals excluding zero at both median and extreme-vorticity targets. This decline is robust: it is unchanged when target classes are defined by a threshold pooled across all sampled cutouts rather than locally, it survives a sixth-order finite-difference recomputation of the full pipeline, and it is insensitive to the inner cutoff. The looseness of the bound is thus a radius-dependent margin, not a fixed factor. Expressed as the dimensionless tightness rather than the dimensional capacity, the curves nearly collapse across the threefold range in . The realized far field is dynamically substantial: the magnitude ratio reaches 0.50 at median targets and 0.44–0.48 in the extreme-vorticity tail at , so by the triangle inequality the contribution complementary to the measured far-field band has a magnitude at least approximately half of the total at the median and at least at the most intense events, with the far field a near-equal partner at the largest measured radius. Cancellation is systematically weaker at extreme-vorticity targets than at the median: the tail-to-median tightness ratio is 1.2–1.7 and grows with radius, so the sign organization that suppresses the far field weakens precisely at the events most relevant to amplification. A per-shell cancellation diagnostic shows that the looseness is already present within individual radial shells and strengthens with radius in both intensity classes.