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Updated: Jul 17, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Dynamic alignment in driven magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
Joanne Mason1, Fausto Cattaneo, Stanislav Boldyrev
1Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of Chicago, 5640 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA.
Abstract:
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 lambda approximately as theta(lambda) is proportional to lambda(1/4). This can naturally lead to a weakening of the nonlinear interactions and provide an explanation for the energy spectrum E(k) is proportional to k(-3/2) that is observed in numerical experiments of strongly magnetized turbulence.
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