Dynamics of Energy Condensation in Two-Dimensional Turbulence

We report a numerical study, supplemented by phenomenological explanations, of “energy condensation” in forced 2D turbulence in a biperiodic box. Condensation is a finite size effect which occurs after the standard inverse cascade reaches the size of the system. It leads to the emergence of a coherent vortex dipole. We show that the time growth of the dipole is self-similar, and it contains most of the injected energy, thus resulting in an energy spectrum which is markedly steeper than the standard k^-5/3 one. Once the coherent component is subtracted, however, the remaining fluctuations have a spectrum close to k^-1. The fluctuations decay slowly as the coherent part grows.