English

On Ohm's law in reduced plasma fluid models

Plasma Physics 2021-11-17 v1

Abstract

Drift-reduced MHD models are widely used to study magnetised plasma phenomena, in particular for magnetically confined fusion applications, as well as in solar and astrophysical research. This letter discusses the choice of Ohm's law in these models, the resulting dispersion relations for the dynamics parallel to the magnetic field, and the implications for numerical simulations. We find that if electron pressure is included in Ohm's law, then both electromagnetic and finite electron mass effects must also be included in order to obtain physical dispersion relations. A simple modification to the plasma vorticity is also found which improves handling of low density regions, of particular relevance to the simulation of the boundary region of magnetised plasmas.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.05329,
  title  = {On Ohm's law in reduced plasma fluid models},
  author = {B. D. Dudson and S. L. Newton and J. T. Omotani and J. Birch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.05329},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

21 pages, 3 figures. To be submitted to PPCF

R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:00:49.833Z