Unveiling Nature’s Secrets: How “Odd Viscosity” Transforms Turbulent Chaos Into Patterns

Physicists have demonstrated the emergence of patterns from chaos in turbulent fluids.
The turbulent motion of a tumbling river or the outflow from a jet engine is chaotic: that is, it contains no obvious pattern.

But according to a new study, regular patterns can emerge from the turbulent motion of fluids. What you need is an intriguing property called “odd viscosity” that arises under certain conditions, such as when the particles in the fluid all spin in the same direction. Though it’s a specialized circumstance, there are many contexts in nature where a version of this effect may exist, such as in the corona of the sun and the solar wind.