2006/02/28 by Joanne Mason, Fausto Cattaneo, Stanislav Boldyrev · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph #nlin.CD #physics.flu-dyn #physics.plasm-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.97.255002
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 255002 (2006) · 4 pages, 2 figures, minor changes to match published version
arxiv created 2006/12/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
Motivated by recent analytic predictions, we report numerical evidence showing that in driven incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence the magnetic- and velocity-field fluctuations locally tend to align the directions of their polarizations. This dynamic alignment is stronger at smaller scales with the angular mismatch between the polarizations decreasing with the scale λapproximately as θλ~ λ1/4. This can naturally lead to a weakening of the nonlinear interactions and provide an explanation for the energy spectrum E(k) ~ k-3/2 that is observed in numerical experiments of strongly magnetized turbulence.