We discuss a novel instability in inertia-less electron magneto-hydrodynamics (EMHD), which arises from a combination of electron velocity shear and electron density gradients. The unstable modes have a lengthscale longer than the transverse density scale, and a growth-rate of the order of the inverse Hall timescale. We suggest that this density-shear instability may be of importance in magnetic reconnection regions on scales smaller than the ion skin depth, and in neutron star crusts.
We demonstrate that the so-called Hall drift instability, previously argued to be relevant in neutron star crusts, is a resistive tearing instability rather than an instability of the Hall term itself. We argue that the density-shear instability is of greater significance in neutron stars than the tearing instability, because it generally has a faster growth-rate and is less sensitive to geometry and boundary conditions.
We prove that, for uniform electron density, EMHD is "at least as stable" as regular, incompressible MHD, in the sense that any field configuration that is stable in MHD is also stable in EMHD. We present a connection between the density-shear instability in EMHD and the magneto-buoyancy instability in anelastic MHD.
Analytic solutions of the magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium equations for a cylindrically symmetric magnetically confined plasma with reversed magnetic shear, s < 0, and sheared flow are constructed by prescribing the safety factor-, poloidal velocity- and axial velocity- profiles consistently with experimental ones.
We study the stability of shear flows in a fully ionized plasma. Kelvin-Helmholtz is a well known, macroscopic and ideal shear-driven instability. In sufficiently low density plasmas, also the microscopic Hall magneto-shear instability can take place. We performed three-dimensional simulations of the Hall-MHD equations where these two instabilities are present, and carried out a comparative study. We find that when the shear flow is so intense that its vorticity surpasses the ion-cyclotron frequency of the plasma, the Hall magneto-shear instability is not only non-negligible, but it actually d…
We have derived the full set of MHD equations for incompressible shear flow of a magnetized fluid and considered their solution in the wave-vector space. The linearized equations give the famous amplification of slow magnetosonic waves and describe the magnetorotational instability. The nonlinear terms in our analysis are responsible for the creation of turbulence and self-sustained spectral density of the MHD (Alfven and pseudo-Alfven) waves. Perspectives for numerical simulations of weak turbulence and calculation of the effective viscosity of accretion disks are shortly discussed in k-space…
Leveling of MHD turbulence imbalance in shear flows
Abastumani Astrophysical Observatory（阿巴斯图马尼天体物理观测站）；Department of Physics, Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences, Tbilisi State University（第比利斯国立大学精确与自然科学学院物理系）；Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf（德累斯顿-罗斯多夫亥姆霍兹中心）；M. Nodia Institute of Geophysics（M.诺迪亚地球物理研究所）
Revisiting the Growth Rate of the Relativistic Tearing Instability: The Role of the Non-ideal MHD Structure
SIT Research Laboratories, Shibaura Institute of Technology（芝浦工业大学 SIT 研究实验室）；Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University（京都大学汤川理论物理研究所（YITP））；Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)（马克斯·普朗克引力物理研究所（爱因斯坦研究所））
Alfvénic component of MHD turbulence damps Alfvénic waves. The consequences of this effect are important for many processes, from cosmic ray (CR) propagation to launching outflows and winds in galaxies and other magnetized systems. We discuss the differences in the damping of the streaming instability by turbulence and the damping of a plane parallel wave. The former takes place in the system of reference aligned with the local direction of magnetic field along which CRs stream. The latter is in the reference frame of the mean magnetic field and traditionally considered in plasma studies. We a…
There is a well established theory of Ballooning modes in a toroidal plasma. The cornerstone of this is a local eigenvalue lambda on each magnetic surface - which also depends on the ballooning phase angle k. In stationary plasmas lambda(k) is required only near its maximum, but in rotating plasmas its average over k is required. Unfortunately in many case lambda(k) does not exist for some range of k, because the spectrum there contains only a stable continuum. This limits the application of the theory, and raises the important question of whether this "stable interval" gives rise to significa…
Electron-scale surface waves are shown to be unstable in the transverse plane of a shear flow in an initially unmagnetized plasma, unlike in the (magneto)hydrodynamics case. It is found that these unstable modes have a higher growth rate than the closely related electron-scale Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in relativistic shears. Multidimensional particle-in-cell simulations verify the analytic results and further reveal the emergence of mushroom-like electron density structures in the nonlinear phase of the instability, similar to those observed in the Rayleigh Taylor instability despite the g…
Alfven Eigenmodes and magneto-hydrodynamic modes are destabilized in DIII-D reverse magnetic shear configurations and may limit the performance of the device. We use the reduced MHD equations in a full 3D system, coupled with equations of density and parallel velocity moments for the energetic particles (with gyro-fluid closures) as well as the geodesic acoustic wave dynamics. The aim of the study consists in finding ways to avoid or minimize MHD and AE activity for different magnetic field configurations and neutral beam injection operational regimes. The simulations show at the beginning of …
We present a linear stability analysis of the perturbation modes in anisotropic MHD flows with velocity shear and strong magnetic field. Collisionless or weakly collisional plasma is described within the 16-momentum MHD fluid closure model, that takes into account not only the effect of pressure anisotropy, but also the effect of anisotropic heat fluxes. In this model the low frequency acoustic wave is revealed into a standard acoustic mode and higher frequency fast thermo-acoustic and lower frequency slow thermo-acoustic waves. It is shown that thermo-acoustic waves become unstable and grow e…
The spontaneous evolution of magnetic reconnection in generalized situations (with thermodynamic asymmetry regarding the current sheet and magnetic shear) is investigated using two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic simulation. We focus on the asymptotic state of temporal evolution, i.e., the self-similarly expanding phase (Nitta et al. 2001). 1) A long fast-mode shock is generated in front of the shorter plasmoid as in the shear-less thermodynamically asymmetric case; however, the sheared magnetic component weakens the shock. This fast shock may work as a particle acceleration site. 2) The short…
The large-scale dynamics of plasmas is well described within the framework of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). However, whenever the ion density of the plasma becomes sufficiently low, the Hall effect is likely to become important. The role of the Hall effect has been studied in several astrophysical plasma processes, such as magnetic reconnection, magnetic dynamo, MHD turbulence or MHD instabilities. In particular, the development of small-scale instabilities is essential to understand the transport properties in a number of astrophysical plasmas. The magneto-rotational instability, which takes pl…
A problem of the instability of an inhomogeneous axisymmetric plasma jet in a parallel magnetic field is solved. The jet boundary becomes, under certain conditions, unstable relative to magnetosonic oscillations (Kelvin-Helmholtz instability) in the presence of a shear flow at the jet boundary. Because of its internal inhomogeneity the plasma jet has resonance surfaces, where conversion takes place between various modes of plasma MHD oscillations. Propagating in inhomogeneous plasma, fast magnetosonic waves drive the Alfven and slow magnetosonic oscillations, tightly localized across the magne…
The interacting vorticity wave formalism for shear flow instabilities is extended here to the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) setting, to provide a mechanistic description for the stabilising and destabilising of shear instabilities by the presence of a background magnetic field. The interpretation relies on local vorticity anomalies inducing a non-local velocity field, resulting in action-at-a-distance. It is shown here that the waves supported by the system are able to propagate vorticity via the Lorentz force, and waves may interact; existence of instability then rests upon whether the choice of …
We study a resistive tearing instability developing in a system evolving through the combined effect of Hall drift in the Electron-MHD limit and Ohmic dissipation. We explore first the exponential growth of the instability in the linear case and we find the fastest growing mode, the corresponding eigenvalues and dispersion relation. The instability growth rate scales as $γ\propto B^{2/3} σ^{-1/3}$ where $B$ is the magnetic field and $σ$ the electrical conductivity. We confirm the development of the tearing resistive instability in the fully non-linear case, in a plane parallel configuration wh…
Drift instabilities contribute to the formation of edge turbulence and zonal flows, and thus the anomalous transport in tokamaks. Experiments often found micro-scale tur- bulence strongly coupled with large-scale magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) processes, whereas a general framework has been lacking that can cover both regimes, in partic- ular, their coupling. In this paper, the linear resistive drift wave instability (DWI) is investigated using a full 2-fluid MHD model, as well as its numerical implementation in NIMROD code. Both analytical and numerical analyses reveal a macro-scale global drift w…
Our goal is to gain new insights into the physics of wave overreflection phenomenon in MHD nonuniform/shear flows changing the existing trend/approach of the phenomenon study. The performed analysis allows to separate from each other different physical processes, grasp their interplay and, by this way, construct the basic physics of the overreflection in incompressible MHD flows with linear shear of mean velocity, ${\bf U}_0=(Sy,0,0)$, that contain two different types of Alfv${\rm \acute{e}}$n waves. These waves are reduced to pseudo- and shear shear-Alfv${\rm \acute{e}}$n waves when wavenumbe…
The influence of viscosity gradient (due to shear flow) on low frequency collective modes in strongly coupled dusty plasma is analyzed. It is shown that for a well known viscoelastic plasma model, the velocity shear dependent viscosity leads to an instability of the shear mode. The inhomogeneous viscous force and velocity shear coupling supply the free energy for the instability. The combined strength of shear flow and viscosity gradient wins over any stabilizing force and makes the shear mode unstable. Implication of such a novel instability and its applications are briefly outlined.
Magnetic fields and flows in coronal structures, for example, in gradual phases in flares, can be described by 2D and 3D magnetohydrostatic (MHS) and steady magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibria. Within a physically simplified, but exact mathematical model, we study the electric currents and corresponding electric fields generated by shear flows. Starting from exact and analytically calculated magnetic potential fields, we solveid the nonlinear MHD equations self-consistently. By applying a magnetic shear flow and assuming a nonideal MHD environment, we calculated an electric field via Faraday'…
Verification and validation of the internal kink instability in tokamak have been performed for both gyrokinetic (GTC) and kinetic-MHD codes (GAM-solver, M3D-C1-K, NOVA, XTOR-K). Using realistic magnetic geometry and plasma profiles from the same equilibrium reconstruction of the DIII-D shot #141216, these codes exhibit excellent agreement for the growth rate and mode structure of the internal kink mode when all kinetic effects are suppresed. The simulated radial mode structures agree quantitatively with the electron cyclotron emission measurement after adjusting, within the experimental uncer…
In this paper, we report our recent findings on the relativistic Weibel instability and its nonlinear saturation by performing numerical simulations of collisionless plasmas. Analysis of the obtained numerical results revealed that the nonlinear phase of the Weibel instability can be described by characteristic phases based on the Weibel filaments' current density in terms of particle and Alfvén limit currents. We also analyzed the relativistic kink instability based on the energy principle in the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) regime, and found that the Weibel filaments do not suffer from the kink…
The linear non-modal kinetic theory of the kinetic drift-Alfven instability of plasma shear flows reveals the temporal non-modal growth with growing with time growth rate. The turbulent scattering of the sheared modes on ions accelerates this growth. The instability ceases its growth when the coupling of the drift and Alfven waves violates due to the changing with time frequencies of the drift and Alfven waves in shear flow.
Astrophysical plasmas are often subject to both rotation and large-scale background magnetic fields. Individually, each is known to two-dimensionalize the flow in the perpendicular plane. In realistic flows, both of these effects are simultaneously present and, importantly, need not be aligned. In this work, we numerically investigate three-dimensional forced magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence subject to the competing effects of global rotation and a perpendicular background magnetic field. We focus on the case of a strong background field and find that increasing the rotation rate from zero…
The electrostatic shear-flow-driven ion cyclotron instability of magnetic field aligned sheared plasma flow is investigated analytically. It is shown that the shear-flow-driven electrostatic ion cyclotron instability can be considered as a combination of three different instabilities determined by theirs own mechanism of excitation: ion-kinetic, ion-hydrodynamic and electron-kinetic. Each of these instabilities are dominant in different ranges of the wavelength along the magnetic field. The linearized dispersion equation is solved within the limits of long and short waves along the magnetic fi…
The effects that energetic trapped ions have on linear resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) instabilities are studied in a reduced model that captures the essential physics driving or damping the modes through variations in the magnetic shear. The drift-kinetic orbital interaction of a slowing down distribution of trapped energetic ions with a resistive MHD instability is integrated to a scalar contribution to the perturbed pressure, and entered into an asymptotic matching formalism for the resistive MHD dispersion relation. Toroidal magnetic field line curvature is included to model trapping i…
The intermittent small-scale structure of turbulence governs energy dissipation in many astrophysical plasmas and is often believed to have universal properties for sufficiently large systems. In this work, we argue that small-scale turbulence in accretion disks is universal in the sense that it is insensitive to the magnetorotational instability (MRI) and background shear, and therefore indistinguishable from standard homogeneous magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence at small scales. We investigate the intermittency of current density, vorticity, and energy dissipation in numerical simulations…
A new analytical nonmodal approach to investigate the plasma instabilities driven by the sheared current is presented and applied to the analysis of the linear evolution of the Simon-Hoh (S-H) instability of a plasma in the inhomogeneous electric field. We found analytically strong nonmodal growth for this instability which is missed completely in the normal modes analysis but dominates the normal mode growth when the shearing rate of the current velocity is above the growth rate of the S-H instability with uniform current. It includes also the nonmodal growth for the subcritical perturbations…
This paper studies the instability of two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) systems on a sphere using analytical methods. The underlying flow consists of a zonal differential rotation and a toroidal magnetic field is present. Semicircle rules that prescribe the possible domain of the wave velocity in the complex plane for general flow and field profiles are derived. The paper then sets out an analytical study of the `clamshell instability', which features field lines on the two hemispheres tilting in opposite directions (Cally 2001, Sol. Phys. vol. 199, pp. 231--249). An asymptotic solutio…
Linear stability analysis of strongly coupled incompressible dusty plasma in presence of shear flow has been carried out using Generalized Hydrodynamical(GH) model. With the proper Galilean invariant GH model, a nonlocal eigenvalue analysis has been done using different velocity profiles. It is shown that the effect of elasticity enhances the growth rate of shear flow driven Kelvin- Helmholtz (KH) instability. The interplay between viscosity and elasticity not only enhances the growth rate but the spatial domain of the instability is also widened. The growth rate in various parameter space and…
Magnetic reconnection is believed to be the driver of many explosive phenomena in Astrophysics, from solar to gamma-ray flares in magnetars and in the Crab nebula. However, reconnection rates from classic MHD models are far too slow to explain such observations. Recently, it was realized that when a current sheet gets sufficiently thin, the reconnection rate of the tearing instability becomes "ideal", in the sense that the current sheet destabilizes on the "macroscopic" Alfvénic timescales, regardless of the Lundquist number of the plasma. Here we present 2D compressible MHD simulations in the…
The Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH) instability is studied in a non-Newtonian dusty plasma with an experimentally verified model [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 98}, 145003 (2007)] of shear flow rate dependent viscosity. The shear flow profile used here is a parabolic type bounded flow. Both the shear thinning and shear thickening properties are investigated in compressible as well as incompressible limits using a linear stability analysis. Like the stabilizing effect of compressibility on the KH instability, the non-Newtonian effect in shear thickening regime could also suppress the instability but on the contr…
In this paper, we revisit the governing equations for linear magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves and instabilities existing within a magnetized, plane-parallel, self-gravitating slab. Our approach allows for fully non-uniformly magnetized slabs, which deviate from isothermal conditions, such that the well-known Alfvén and slow continuous spectra enter the description. We generalize modern MHD textbook treatments, by showing how self-gravity enters the MHD wave equation, beyond the frequently adopted Cowling approximation. This clarifies how Jeans' instability generalizes from hydro to magnetohydro…
It is demonstrated that low frequency shear modes in a strongly coupled, inhomogeneous, dusty plasma can grow on account of an instability involving the dynamical charge fluctuations of the dust grains. The instability is driven by the gradient of the equilibrium dust charge density and is associated with the finite charging time of the dust grains. The present calculations, carried out in the generalized hydrodynamic viscoelastic formalism, also bring out important modifications in the threshold and growth rate of the instability due to collective effects associated with coupling to the compr…
The effect of a narrow sub-Alfvenic shear flow layer near the minimum q_min of the tokamak safety factor profile in a configuration with reversed central shear is analyzed. Sufficiently strong velocity shear gives rise to a broad spectrum of fast growing Kelvin-Helmholtz (KH)-like ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) modes with dominant mode numbers m,n ~ 10. Nonlinear simulations with finite resistivity show magnetic reconnection near ripples caused by KH-like vortices, the formation of turbulent structures, and a flattening of the flow profile. The KH modes are compared to double tearing modes (D…
The cross-magnetic-field (i.e., perpendicular) profile of ion temperature and the perpendicular profile of the magnetic-field-aligned (parallel) plasma flow are sometimes inhomogeneous for space and laboratory plasma. Instability caused by a gradient in either the ion-temperature profile or by shear in the parallel flow has been discussed extensively in the literature. In this paper, hydrodynamic plasma stability is investigated, real and imaginary frequency are quantified over a range of the shear parameter, the normalized wavenumber, and the ratio of density-gradient and ion-temperature-grad…
The linear and renormalized nonlinear kinetic theory of drift instability of plasma shear flow across the magnetic field, which has the Kelvin's method of shearing modes or so-called non-modal approach as its foundation, is developed. The developed theory proves that the time-dependent effect of the finite ion Larmor radius is the key effect, which is responsible for the suppression of drift turbulence in an inhomogeneous electric field. This effect leads to the non-modal decrease of the frequency and growth rate of the unstable drift perturbations with time. We find that turbulent scattering …
We investigate a role of the Hall-effect in the current sheet evolution and onset of the secondary tearing (plasmoid) instability in the framework of the incompressible resistive Hall-magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). The model under consideration is a force-free modification of the Taylor's problem. Thus, the first part of the paper is devoted to a detailed analytical study of the Hall-MHD forced magnetic reconnection in a tearing stable force-free magnetic configuration. Then, in the second part, these results are used to investigate when and how the plasmoid instability can develop in the course …
A geometric wedge model of the near-earth nightside plasma sheet is used to derive a wave equation for low frequency shear flow-interchange waves which transmit $\vec{E} \times \vec{B}$ sheared zonal flows along magnetic flux tubes towards the ionosphere. Discrepancies with the wave equation result used in Kalmoni et al. (2015) for shear flow-ballooning instability are discussed. The shear flow-interchange instability appears to be responsible for substorm onset. The wedge wave equation is used to compute rough expressions for dispersion relations and local growth rates in the midnight region …
Braginskii MHD provides a more accurate description of many plasma environments than classical MHD since it actively treats the stress tensor using a closure derived from physical principles. Stress tensor effects nonetheless remain relatively unexplored for solar MHD phenomena, especially in nonlinear regimes. This paper analytically examines nonlinear damping and longitudinal flows of propagating shear Alfvén waves. Most previous studies of MHD waves in Braginskii MHD considered the strict linear limit of vanishing wave perturbations. We show that those former linear results only apply to Al…
A recently developed spectral-element adaptive refinement incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code [Rosenberg, Fournier, Fischer, Pouquet, J. Comp. Phys. 215, 59-80 (2006)] is applied to simulate the problem of MHD island coalescence instability (MICI) in two dimensions. MICI is a fundamental MHD process that can produce sharp current layers and subsequent reconnection and heating in a high-Lundquist number plasma such as the solar corona [Ng and Bhattacharjee, Phys. Plasmas, 5, 4028 (1998)]. Due to the formation of thin current layers, it is highly desirable to use adaptively or statical…
Buneman instability is often driven in magnetic reconnection. Understanding how velocity shear in the beams driving the Buneman instability affects the growth and saturation of waves is relevant to turbulence, heating, and diffusion in magnetic reconnection. Using a Mathieu-equation analysis for weak cosine velocity shear together with Vlasov simulations, the effects of shear on the kinetic Buneman instability are studied in a plasma consisting of strongly magnetized electrons and cold unmagnetized ions. In the linearly unstable phase, shear enhances the coupling between oblique waves and the …
A large set of numerical simulations of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence induced by the magnetorotational instability (MRI) is presented. Revisiting the previous survey conducted by Sano et al. (2004), we investigate the gas pressure dependence of the saturation level. In ideal MHD simulations, the gas pressure dependence is found to be very sensitive to the choice of a numerical scheme. This is because the numerical magnetic Prandtl number varies according to the scheme as well as the pressure, which considerably affects the results. The saturation level is more sensitive to the numerical…
The effect of shear flow on the resistive tearing instability
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克学院）；Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory（普林斯顿等离子体物理实验室）
We consider a differentially rotating flow of an incompressible electrically conducting and viscous fluid subject to an external axial magnetic field and to an azimuthal magnetic field that is allowed to be generated by a combination of an axial electric current external to the fluid and electrical currents in the fluid itself. In this setting we derive an extended version of the celebrated Hain-Lust differential equation for the radial Lagrangian displacement that incorporates the effects of the axial and azimuthal magnetic fields, differential rotation, viscosity, and electrical resistivity.…
We show that the space charge dynamics of high intensity beams in the plane perpendicular to the magnetic field in cyclotrons is described by the two-dimensional Euler equations for an incompressible fluid. This analogy with fluid dynamics gives a unified and intuitive framework to explain the beam spiraling and beam break up behavior observed in experiments and in simulations. In particular, we demonstrate that beam break up is the result of a classical instability occurring in fluids subject to a sheared flow. We give scaling laws for the instability and predict the nonlinear evolution of be…
Magnetorotational Instability (MRI), the instability causing turbulent transport in accretion disks, is studied in the kinetic regime. Radiatively Inefficient Accretion Flows (RIAFs), like the one around the supermassive black hole in the center of our Galaxy, are believed to be collisionless. Kinetic MHD formalism, based on the moments of the Vlasov equation, is used for linear analysis and nonlinear simulations. ZEUS MHD code is modified to include key kinetic MHD terms: anisotropic pressure tensor and anisotropic thermal conduction. Simulations use the local shearing box approximation. Pres…
C-type shocks are believed to be ubiquitous in turbulent molecular clouds thanks to ambipolar diffusion. We investigate whether the drag instability in 1D isothermal C-shocks, inferred from the local linear theory of Gu & Chen, can appear in non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic simulations. Two C-shock models (with narrow and broad steady-state shock widths) are considered to represent the typical environment of star-forming clouds. The ionization-recombination equilibrium is adopted for the one-fluid approach. In the 1D simulation, the inflow gas is continuously perturbed by a sinusoidal density flu…
