The ‘preferred mode’ of an incompressible axisymmetric free jet has been organized through controlled perturbation, and spatial distributions of time-average as well as phase-average flow properties in the near field are documented. The excitation produces noticeable changes in the time-average measures of the jet, although these changes are less dramatic than those for the excitation producing stable vortex pairing. For different stages in the evolution of the preferred-mode coherent structure, the phase-average vorticity, coherent Reynolds stress, and incoherent turbulence intensities and Reynolds stress have been educed through phase-locked hot-wire measurements, over the spatial extent of the structure and without invoking the Taylor hypothesis. For a particular stage of the evolution (i.e. when the structure is centred at x/D ≃ 3) the distributions of these quantities have been compared for both initially laminar and fully turbulent exit boundary layers, and for four jet Reynolds numbers. The relative merits of the coherent structure streamline and pseudo-stream-function patterns, as compared with phase-average velocity contours, for structure boundary identification have been discussed. The structure shape and size agree closely with those inferred from the average streamline pattern of the natural structure educed by Yule (1978).

These data as well as τ-spectra show that even excitation at the preferred mode cannot sustain the initially organized large-scale coherent structure beyond eight diameters from the jet exit. The background turbulence is organized by the coherent motions in such a way that the maximum rate of decrease of the coherent vorticity occurs at the structure centres which are the saddle points of the background-turbulence Reynolds-stress distributions. The structure centres are also the locations of peak phase-average turbulence intensities. The evolving shape of the structure as it travels downstream helps explain the transverse variations of the wavelength and convection velocity across the mixing layer. The coherent structure characteristics are found to be independent of whether the initial boundary layer is laminar or turbulent, but depend somewhat on the jet Reynolds number. With increasing Reynolds number, the structure decreases in the streamwise length and increases in the radial width and becomes relatively more energetic, and more efficient in the production of coherent Reynolds stress.