Discrete representations of orbit structures of flows for topological data analysis

This paper shows that the topological structures of particle orbits generated by a generic class of vector fields on spherical surfaces, called the flow of finite type, are in one-to-one correspondence with discrete structures such as trees/graphs and sequences of letters. The flow of finite type is an extension of structurally stable Hamiltonian vector fields, which appear in many theoretical and numerical investigations of two-dimensional (2D) incompressible fluid flows. Moreover, it contains compressible 2D vector fields such as the Morse-Smale vector fields and the projection of 3D vector fields onto 2D sections. The discrete representation is not only a simple symbolic identifier for the topological structure of complex flows, but it also gives rise to a new methodology of topological data analysis for flows when applied to data brought by measurements, experiments, and numerical simulations of complex flows. As a proof of concept, we provide some applications of the representation theory to 2D compressible vector fields and a 3D vector field arising in an industrial problem.