There is a striking similarity between the vortical structure illustrated in this announcement and the “vortex string” geometry reported by R. C. Y. Mui, D. G. Dommermuth, and E. A. Novikov in 1996.
I have in mind Figure 1 of their paper, “Conditionally averaged vorticity field and turbulence modeling,” Physical Review E 53, 2355–2359 (1996). Figure 1 shows a thin, strongly twisted/spiraling vortical structure with an elongated axial component. The paper explicitly discusses this structure as a “vortex string” and relates its twisting component to vortex stretching.
The resemblance to the structure described here — a vortex that spirals inward and becomes increasingly elongated, while the energy remains finite — seems unusually close. The similarity is not simply that both involve vortex filaments; the overall twisting, elongation, and axial stretching are visually and geometrically quite striking.
The 1996 work was a conditional/statistical description of intense vortical structures in turbulence, based on DNS, and was not a construction of a finite-time Navier–Stokes singularity. I am therefore not suggesting that it proves the present result.
Rather, I wonder whether it would be useful to compare the actual local vorticity and velocity fields, as well as their scaling laws, in the 1996 vortex-string structure and in the present construction. There may be an interesting connection here that is worth examining.