Which different turbulent flow states are allowed in centrifugal convection?

Turbulence is often treated as memoryless. Once the forcing and control parameters are fixed and after any transients have decayed, the system settles into a unique, statistically stable turbulent state. A growing body of work shows that this paradigm does not have to be true. Even under identical forcing and boundary conditions, turbulent flows may sustain multiple long-lived structures, each with its own characteristic transport properties and fluctuations. The paper by Yao et al. (2026 J. Fluid Mech., vol. 1030, R4) demonstrates this phenomenon particularly clearly for centrifugal convection, where the flow self-organises into different numbers of coherent rolls depending on the initial conditions. Beyond reporting the observation of multiple flow states, they provide a theoretical explanation as to why only certain flow states can exist and why the range of possible multiple states shrinks as turbulence intensifies.