A Quantum Inspired Approach to Exploit Turbulence Structures

We introduce a new paradigm for analyzing the structure of turbulent flows by quantifying correlations between different length scales using methods inspired from quantum many-body physics. We present results for interscale correlations of two paradigmatic flow examples, and use these insights along with tensor network theory to design a structure-resolving algorithm for simulating turbulent flows. With this algorithm, we find that the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations can be accurately solved even when reducing the number of parameters required to represent the velocity field by more than one order of magnitude compared to direct numerical simulation. Our quantum-inspired approach provides a pathway towards conducting computational fluid dynamics on quantum computers.