It is a long time that I have been thinking of some new ideas in turbulence and vortex-identification-techniques. One of them is simply as follows:

Whatever we are calling turbulence occurs when the translational mode of energy of the fluid molecules is not the dominant mode of energy. (perhaps vibrational mode is the dominant one)

It seems to me that a recent paper (Complex Nonlinear Opto-Fluidity) of Segev and Christodoulides and their colleagues (Segev is a pioneer in Nonlinear-Opto-Fluidity and an authority in Nonlinear-Optics) at CLEO-QELS-2008 (http://www.cleoconference.org/) is along the same pathline.

They have found a coupling between transfer of angular-momentum from light (photon) to the fluid. I believe this is a preliminary sign in proving the aforementioned statement.

It would be interesting to extend their efforts with 2 main objectives:

1) Extension of their experimental efforts to lower-size particle and find correlation(s) between different molecules-modes-of-energy of & fluid-eddies.

2) Numerical Investigations: Studying Time-Dependent-Schrödinger-Equations & Navier-Stokes-Equations simultaneously in order to track the creation and evolution of vortical structures from quantum-turbulence.