A Lie-Poisson bracket is presented for a five-field gyrofluid model, thereby showing the model to be Hamiltonian. The model includes the effects of magnetic field curvature and describes the evolution of the electron and ion gyro-center densities, the parallel component of the ion and electron velocities, and the ion temperature. The quasineutrality property and Amperes law determine respectively the electrostatic potential and magnetic flux. The Casimir invariants are presented, and shown to be associated to five Lagrangian invariants advected by distinct velocity fields. A linear, local study of the model is conducted both with and without Landau and diamagnetic resonant damping terms. Stability criteria and dispersion relations for the electrostatic and the electromagnetic cases are derived and compared with their analogs for fluid and kinetic models.
A mechanism for fast magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasma is studied for understanding sawtooth collapse in tokamak discharges by using a two-fluid model for cold ions and electrons. Explosive growth of the tearing mode enabled by electron inertia is analytically estimated by using an energy principle with a nonlinear displacement map. Decrease of the potential energy in the nonlinear regime (where the island width exceeds the electron skin depth) is found to be steeper than in the linear regime, resulting in accelerated reconnection. Release of potential energy by such a fluid displacement leads to unsteady and strong convective flow, which is not damped by the small dissipation effects in high-temperature tokamak plasmas. Direct numerical simulation in slab geometry substantiates the theoretical prediction of the nonlinear growth.
A mechanism for fast magnetic reconnection in collisionless plasma is studied for understanding sawtooth collapse in tokamak discharges. Nonlinear growth of the tearing mode driven by electron inertia is analytically estimated by invoking the energy principle for the first time. Decrease of potential energy in the nonlinear regime (where the island width exceeds the electron skin depth) is found to be steeper than in the linear regime, resulting in acceleration of the reconnection. Release of free energy by such ideal fluid motion leads to unsteady and strong convective flow, which theoretically corroborates the inertia-driven collapse model of the sawtooth crash [D. Biskamp and J. F. Drake, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 971 (1994)].
We introduce a new matter action principle, with a wide range of applicability, for the Vlasov equation in terms of a conjugate pair of functions. Here we apply this action principle to the study of matter in Bianchi cosmological models in general relativity. The Bianchi models are spatially-homogeneous solutions to the Einstein field equations, classified by the three-dimensional Lie algebra that describes the symmetry group of the model. The Einstein equations for these models reduce to a set of coupled ordinary differential equations. The class A Bianchi models admit a Hamiltonian formulation in which the components of the metric tensor and their time derivatives yield the canonical coordinates. The evolution of anisotropy in the vacuum Bianchi models is determined by a potential due to the curvature of the model, according to its symmetry. For illustrative purposes, we examine the evolution of anisotropy in models with Vlasov matter. The Vlasov content is further simplified by the assumption of cold, counter-streaming matter, a kind of matter that is far from thermal equilibrium and is not describable by an ordinary fluid model nor other more simplistic matter models. Qualitative differences and similarities are found in the dynamics of certain vacuum class A Bianchi models and Bianchi Type I models with cold, counter-streaming Vlasov matter potentials analogous to the curvature potentials of corresponding vacuum models.
