Directed percolation and the transition to turbulence

It may come as a surprise that a phenomenon as ubiquitous and prominent as the transition from laminar to turbulent flow has resisted combined efforts by physicists, engineers and mathematicians, and remained unresolved for almost one and a half centuries. In recent years, various studies have proposed analogies to directed percolation, a well-known universality class in statistical mechanics, which describes a non-equilibrium phase transition from a fluctuating active phase into an absorbing state. It is this unlikely relation between the multiscale, high-dimensional dynamics that signify the transition process in virtually all flows of practical relevance, and the arguably most basic non-equilibrium phase transition, that so far has mainly been the subject of model studies, which I review in this Perspective.