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Register a new userIon Heat and Parallel Momentum Transport by Stochastic Magnetic Fields and Turbulence
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The theory of turbulent transport of parallel ion momentum and heat by the interaction of stochastic magnetic fields and turbulence is presented. Attention is focused on determining the kinetic stress and the compressive energy flux. A critical parameter is identified as the ratio of the turbulent scattering rate to the rate of parallel acoustic dispersion. For the parameter large, the kinetic stress takes the form of a viscous stress. For the parameter small, the quasilinear residual stress is recovered. In practice, the viscous stress is the relevant form, and the quasilinear limit is not observable. This is the principal prediction of this paper. A simple physical picture is developed and shown to recover the results of the detailed analysis.
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The Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability of a shear layer with an initially-uniform magnetic field in the direction of flow is studied in the framework of 2D incompressible magnetohydrodynamics with finite resistivity and viscosity using direct numerical simulations. The shear layer evolves freely, with no external forcing, and thus broadens in time as turbulent stresses transport momentum across it. As with KH-unstable flows in hydrodynamics, the instability here features a conjugate stable mode for every unstable mode in the absence of dissipation. Stable modes are shown to transport momentum up its gradient, shrinking the layer width whenever they exceed unstable modes in amplitude. In simulations with weak magnetic fields, the linear instability is minimally affected by the magnetic field, but enhanced small-scale fluctuations relative to the hydrodynamic case are observed. These enhanced fluctuations coincide with increased energy dissipation and faster layer broadening, with these features more pronounced in simulations with stronger fields. These trends result from the magnetic field reducing the effects of stable modes relative to the transfer of energy to small scales. As field strength increases, stable modes become less excited and thus transport less momentum against its gradient. Furthermore, the energy that would otherwise transfer back to the driving shear due to stable modes is instead allowed to cascade to small scales, where it is lost to dissipation. Approximations of the turbulent state in terms of a reduced set of modes are explored. While the Reynolds stress is well-described using just two modes per wavenumber at large scales, the Maxwell stress is not.
We introduce a topological flux function to quantify the topology of magnetic braids: non-zero, line-tied magnetic fields whose field lines all connect between two boundaries. This scalar function is an ideal invariant defined on a cross-section of the magnetic field, and measures the average poloidal magnetic flux around any given field line, or the average pairwise crossing number between a given field line and all others. Moreover, its integral over the cross-section yields the relative magnetic helicity. Using the fact that the flux function is also an action in the Hamiltonian formulation of the field line equations, we prove that it uniquely characterizes the field line mapping and hence the magnetic topology.
The feasibility of a mean-field dynamo in nonhelical turbulence with superimposed linear shear is studied numerically in elongated shearing boxes. Exponential growth of magnetic field at scales much larger than the outer scale of the turbulence is found. The charateristic scale of the field is l_B ~ S^{-1/2} and growth rate is gamma ~ S, where S is the shearing rate. This newly discovered shear dynamo effect potentially represents a very generic mechanism for generating large-scale magnetic fields in a broad class of astrophysical systems with spatially coherent mean flows.
We demonstrate that, for the case of quasi-equipartition between the velocity and the magnetic field, the Lagrangian-averaged magnetohydrodynamics alpha-model (LAMHD) reproduces well both the large-scale and small-scale properties of turbulent flows; in particular, it displays no increased (super-filter) bottleneck effect with its ensuing enhanced energy spectrum at the onset of the sub-filter-scales. This is in contrast to the case of the neutral fluid in which the Lagrangian-averaged Navier-Stokes alpha-model is somewhat limited in its applications because of the formation of spatial regions with no internal degrees of freedom and subsequent contamination of super-filter-scale spectral properties. No such regions are found in LAMHD, making this method capable of large reductions in required numerical degrees of freedom; specifically, we find a reduction factor of 200 when compared to a direct numerical simulation on a large grid of 1536^3 points at the same Reynolds number.
(abridged) There exists a substantial disagreement between computer simulation results and high-energy density laboratory experiments of the Rayleigh-Taylor instability Kuranz et al. (2010). We adopt the Braginskii formulation for transport in hot, dense plasma, implement and verify the additional physics modules, and conduct a computational study of a single-mode RTI in two dimensions with various combinations of the newly implemented modules. We find that magnetic fields reach levels on the order of 11 MG in the absence of thermal conduction. We observe denting of the RT spike tip and generation of additional higher order modes as a result of these fields. Contrary to interpretation presented in earlier work Nishiguchi (2002), the additional mode is not generated due to modified anisotropic heat transport effects but due to dynamical effect of self-generated magnetic fields. The main effects of thermal conduction are a reduction of the RT instability growth rate (by about 20% for conditions considered here) and inhibited mixing on small scales. In this case, the maximum self-generated magnetic fields are weaker (approximately 1.7 MG). These self-generated magnetic fields are of very similar strength compared to magnetic fields observed recently in HED laboratory experiments Manuel et al. (2012). We find that thermal conduction plays the dominant role in the evolution of the model RTI system considered. It smears out small-scale structure and reduces the RTI growth rate. This may account for the relatively featureless RT spikes seen in experiments, but does not explain mass extensions observed in experiments. Resistivity and related heat source terms were not included in the present work, but we estimate their impact on RTI as modest and not affecting our main conclusions. Resistive effects will be discussed in detail in the next paper in the series.
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