Radiative heating achieves the ultimate regime of thermal convection
Abstract
Turbulent convection is ubiquitous in geophysical and astrophysical contexts: It drives winds in the atmosphere and currents in the ocean, it generates magnetic fields inside planets and stars, and it triggers supernova explosions inside collapsing stellar cores. In many such natural flows, convection is driven by the absorption of incoming radiation (light or neutrinos). We designed an experiment to reproduce such radiatively driven convection in the laboratory. In contrast with convection driven by heating and cooling plates, our radiative heating setup achieves the “ultimate” regime of turbulent convection, which is the one relevant to many natural flows. Such experiments can yield the constitutive laws of turbulent convection, to be implemented into geophysical and astrophysical models.