English

Quasi-isotropic cascade in MHD turbulence with mean field

Plasma Physics 2012-09-21 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

We propose a phenomenological theory of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in the presence of a strong large-scale magnetic field, which establishes a link between the known anisotropic models of strong and weak MHD turbulence We argue that the Iroshnikov-Kraichnan isotropic cascade develops naturally within the plane perpendicular to the mean field, while oblique-parallel cascades with weaker amplitudes can develop, triggered by the perpendicular cascade, with a reduced flux resulting from a quasi-resonance condition. The resulting energy spectrum E(k,k)E(k_\parallel,k_\bot) has the same slope in all directions. The ratio between the extents of the inertial range in the parallel and perpendicular directions is equal to brms/B0b_{rms}/B_0. These properties match those found in recent 3D MHD simulations with isotropic forcing reported in [R. Grappin and W.-C. M\"uller, Phys. Rev. E \textbf{82}, 26406 (2010)].

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1209.4450,
  title  = {Quasi-isotropic cascade in MHD turbulence with mean field},
  author = {Roland Grappin and Wolf-Christian Müller and Özgür Gürcan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1209.4450},
  year   = {2012}
}

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4 pages