Turbulence in nonclosed fluid flows as a noise-induced phase transition

It is hypothesized that the transition to turbulence in nonclosed fluid flows and the formation of coherent structures associated with it is not an excitation of self-oscillations, first periodic and then chaotic, as is commonly adopted by many investigators, but a noise-induced nonequilibrium phase transition of the second kind. It is shown that this hypothesis is supported by a number of numerical and real experiments.