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Updated: Sep 4, 2025

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Three-dimensional direct numerical simulation of free-surface magnetohydrodynamic wave turbulence
Evgeny Kochurin1,2, Guillaume Ricard3, Nikolay Zubarev2,4
1Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, 121205 Moscow, Russia.
Abstract:
We report on three-dimensional direct numerical simulation of wave turbulence on the free surface of a magnetic fluid subjected to an external horizontal magnetic field. A transition from capillary-wave turbulence to anisotropic magneto-capillary wave turbulence is observed for an increasing field. At high enough field, wave turbulence becomes highly anisotropic, cascading mainly perpendicularly to the field direction, in good agreement with the prediction of a phenomenological model, and with anisotropic Alfvén wave turbulence. Although surface waves on a magnetic fluid are different from Alfvén waves in plasma, a strong analogy is found with similar wave spectrum scalings and similar magnetic-field dependent dispersionless wave velocities.
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