Computational discrete Morse theory for divergence-free 2D vector fields

Abstract

We present a simple approach to the topological analysis of divergence-free 2D vector fields using discrete Morse theory. We make use of the fact that the point-wise perpendicular vector field can be interpreted as the gradient of the stream function. The topology of the divergence-free vector field is thereby encoded in the topology of a gradient vector field. We can therefore apply a formulation of computational discrete Morse theory for gradient vector fields. The inherent consistence and robustness of the resulting algorithm is demonstrated on synthetic data and an example from computational fluid dynamics.