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Updated: May 24, 2026

A 100 KW Class Applied-field Magnetoplasmadynamic Thruster
Published on: December 22, 2018
Universal nonlinear small-scale dynamo
1Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, New Mexico, 87545, USA.
Abstract:
We consider astrophysically relevant nonlinear MHD dynamo at large Reynolds numbers (Re). We argue that it is universal in a sense that magnetic energy grows at a rate which is a constant fraction C(E) of the total turbulent dissipation rate. On the basis of locality bounds we claim that this "efficiency of the small-scale dynamo", C(E), is a true constant for large Re and is determined only by strongly nonlinear dynamics at the equipartition scale. We measured C(E) in numerical simulations and observed a value around 0.05 in the highest resolution simulations. We address the issue of C(E) being small, unlike the Kolmogorov constant which is of order unity.
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