Quantized Energy Cascade and Log-Poisson Statistics in Fully Developed Turbulence

It is proposed that the statistics of the inertial range of fully developed turbulence can be described by a quantized random multiplicative process. We then show that (i) the cascade process must be a log-infinitely divisible stochastic process (i.e., stationary independent log-increments); (ii) the inertial-range statistics of turbulent fluctuations, such as the coarse-grained energy dissipation, are log-Poisson; and (iii) a recently proposed scaling model [Z.-S. She and E. Leveque 72 336 (1994)] of fully developed turbulence can be derived. A general theory using the Levy-Khinchine representation for infinitely divisible cascade processes is presented, which allows for a classification of scaling behaviors of various strongly nonlinear dissipative systems.