Related papers: Introduction to Field Line Helicity
Magnetic fields without a direction of continuous symmetry have the generic feature that neighboring field lines exponentiate away from each other and become stochastic, hence the ideal constraint of preserving magnetic field line…
Changes in magnetic helicity are often discussed across a variety of fields, from condensed matter physics to early universe cosmology. It is frequently stated that the helicity change is given by the integral of the gauge field strength…
A relativistically invariant expression for the magnetic and electric helicities of free electromagnetic field through the currents, which created those field, are derived. It is demonstrated that for radiative fields (e.g. laser pulses)…
Magnetic helicity fluxes are investigated in a family of gauges in which the contribution from ideal magnetohydrodynamics takes the form of a purely advective flux. Numerical simulations of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in this advective…
There is not a unique solution to the electro- or magnetostatic problem where the "boundary condition" is merely a specification of the fields along a line. As a practical example, we consider the case where it is desired to have a magnetic…
There is a reformulation of magnetohydrodynamics in which the fundamental dynamical quantities are the positions and velocities of the lines of magnetic flux in the plasma, which turn out to obey equations of motion very much like ideal…
The singularities of an irrotational magnetic field are lines of electric current. This property derives from the relationship between vector fields and the topology of the underlying three-space and allows for a definition of {cosmic…
Observations of magnetic helicity transportation through the solar photosphere reflect the interaction of turbulent plasma movements and magnetic fields in the solar dynamo process. In this chapter, we have reviewed the research process of…
The helicity of a vector field is a measure of the average linking of pairs of integral curves of the field. Computed by a six-dimensional integral, it is widely useful in the physics of fluids. For a divergence-free field tangent to the…
Magnetic field are transported and tangled by turbulence, even as they lose identity due to nonideal or resistive effects. On balance field lines undergo stretch-twist-fold processes. The curvature field, a scalar that measures the tangling…
Recent advances in mean-field theory are reviewed and applications to the Sun, late-type stars, accretion disks, galaxies, and the early Universe are discussed. We focus particularly on aspects of spatio-temporal nonlocality, which is one…
The role of magnetic helicity in astrophysical large-scale dynamos is reviewed and compared with cases where there is no energy supply and an initial magnetic field can only decay. In both cases magnetic energy tends to get redistributed to…
Relative magnetic helicity is conserved by magneto-hydrodynamic evolution even in the presence of moderate resistivity. For that reason, it is often invoked as the most relevant constraint to the dynamical evolution of plasmas in complex…
A review of galactic magnetic fields is given with emphasis on simple analytical solutions of relevant equations and detailed comparison with observations. It is shown that mean-field dynamo theory, in its simplest form, is in a remarkably…
Context. Magnetic helicity is a physical quantity of great importance in the study of astrophysical and natural plasmas. Although a density for helicity cannot be defined, a good proxy for it is field line helicity. The appropriate quantity…
A variety of observations impose upper limits at the nano Gauss level on magnetic fields that are coherent on inter-galactic scales while blazar observations indicate a lower bound $\sim 10^{-16}$ Gauss. Such magnetic fields can play an…
We explore the structure of magnetic field lines in and around filaments in simulations of molecular clouds undergoing global, multi-scale gravitational collapse. In these simulations, filaments are not in a static equilibrium, but are…
Motivated by a scenario of magnetogenesis in which a homogeneous magnetic field is generated during inflation, we study the magnetohydrodynamic evolution of the primordial plasma motions for two kinds of initial conditions -- (i) a…
Kinetic helicity (hereafter helicity) is defined by the correlation between the velocity and the flow-aligned vorticity. Helicity, as well as energy, is an inviscid invariant of the hydrodynamic equations. In contrast to energy, a measure…
A topological constraint on the dynamics of a magnetic field in a flux tube arises from the fixed point indices of its field line mapping. This can explain unexpected behaviour in recent resistive-magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetic…