English

Strong Anisotropic MHD Turbulence with Cross Helicity

Astrophysics 2009-11-13 v1

Abstract

This paper proposes a new phenomenology for strong incompressible MHD turbulence with nonzero cross helicity. This phenomenology is then developed into a quantitative Fokker-Planck model that describes the time evolution of the anisotropic power spectra of the fluctuations propagating parallel and anti-parallel to the background magnetic field. It is found that in steady state the power spectra of the magnetic field and total energy are steeper than a Kolmogorov spectrum and become increasingly steep as C/E increases, where C is the cross helicity and E is the fluctuation energy. Increasing C with fixed E increases the time required for energy to cascade to smaller scales, reduces the cascade power, and increases the anisotropy of the small-scale fluctuations. The implications of these results for the solar wind and solar corona are discussed in some detail.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.4903,
  title  = {Strong Anisotropic MHD Turbulence with Cross Helicity},
  author = {Benjamin D. G. Chandran},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.4903},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

30 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ