Anomalous scaling of a passive scalar in the presence of strong anisotropy

Field theoretic renormalization group and the operator product expansion are applied to a model of a passive scalar field, advected by the Gaussian strongly anisotropic velocity field. Inertial-range anomalous scaling behavior is established, and explicit asymptotic expressions for the n-th order structure functions of scalar field are obtained; they are represented by superpositions of power laws with nonuniversal (dependent on the anisotropy parameters) anomalous exponents. In the limit of vanishing anisotropy, the exponents are associated with tensor composite operators built of the scalar gradients, and exhibit a kind of hierarchy related to the degree of anisotropy: the less is the rank, the less is the dimension and, consequently, the more important is the contribution to the inertial-range behavior. The leading terms of the even (odd) structure functions are given by the scalar (vector) operators. For the finite anisotropy, the exponents cannot be associated with individual operators (which are essentially ``mixed'' in renormalization), but the aforementioned hierarchy survives for all the cases studied. The second-order structure function is studied in more detail using the renormalization group and zero-mode techniques.