Imperfect supercritical bifurcation in a three-dimensional turbulent wake.

The turbulent wake of a square-back body exhibits a strong bimodal behavior. The wake randomly undergoes symmetry-breaking reversals between two mirror asymmetric steady modes [reflectional symmetry-breaking (RSB) modes]. The characteristic time for reversals is about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude larger than the natural time for vortex shedding.