Descripción: Fil:Gómez, D.O. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: Numerical simulations of two-dimensional Magnetohydrodynamic (2D MHD) turbulence reveal the presence of a huge number of sites where magnetic reconnection locally occurs. The properties of this ensemble of reconnection events, that are spontaneously generated by turbulence, have been studied. The associated reconnection rates, computed as the electric field at the neutral points, are broadly distributed and the statistics of these events are presented. This new description of reconnection is relevant for space and laboratory plasmas, where generally turbulence is present. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.

Descripción: We present results from two 15363 direct numerical simulations of rotating turbulence where both energy and helicity are injected into the flow by an external forcing. The dual cascade of energy and helicity toward smaller scales observed in isotropic and homogeneous turbulence is broken in the presence of rotation, with the development of an inverse cascade of energy now coexisting with direct cascades of energy and helicity. In the direct cascade range, the flux of helicity dominates over that of energy at low Rossby number. These cascades have several consequences for the statistics of the flow. The evolution of global quantities and of the energy and helicity spectra is studied, and comparisons with simulations at different Reynolds and Rossby numbers at lower resolution are done to identify scaling laws. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.

Descripción: Fil:Dmitruk, P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: Fil:Dmitruk, P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: Fil:Dasso, S. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: The first direct determination of the inertial range energy cascade rate, using an anisotropic form of Yaglom's law for magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, is obtained in the solar wind with multispacecraft measurements. The two-point mixed third-order structure functions of Elsässer fluctuations are integrated over a sphere in magnetic field-aligned coordinates, and the result is consistent with a linear scaling. Therefore, volume integrated heating and cascade rates are obtained that, unlike previous studies, make only limited assumptions about the underlying spectral geometry of solar wind turbulence. These results confirm the turbulent nature of magnetic and velocity field fluctuations in the low frequency limit, and could supply the energy necessary to account for the nonadiabatic heating of the solar wind. © 2011 American Physical Society.

Descripción: A simple model based on the Hasegawa-Mima equation is used to study dipole vortex interactions and turbulence of electrostatic drift waves in a plasma. It is shown that if nonlinear effects are important during vortex collisions, dipoles are broken into monopoles. Nonadiabatic effects also affect dipole behavior, which can be destroyed by the instability of emitted waves (dipole vortex radiation). Simulations of turbulence in both decaying and driven cases show the appearance of long-lived monopole structures. These coherent structures contribute to stop the cascade of energy to large scales, and then to reach a self-organized stationary state. Some numerical evidence is done that Hasegawa-Mima turbulence has a long-time behavior that is much richer than the thermodynamic equilibrium state observed in two-dimensional hydrodynamics. In driven turbulence, an important departure from Gaussian statistics of vorticity fluctuations is found, giving some indication of intermittency. Using various analyzing techniques, in particular the proper orthogonal decomposition, we show that the turbulence can be characterized by a field of coherent structures, which dominates the dynamics of the system, and random waves interacting weakly with the coherent structures. (c) 1995 The American Physical Society © 1995 The American Physical Society.

Descripción: Invariance properties of physical systems govern their behaviour: energy conservation in turbulence drives a wide distribution of energy among modes, as observed in geophysical or astrophysical flows. In ideal hydrodynamics, the role of the invariance of helicity (correlation between velocity and its curl, measuring departures from mirror symmetry) remains unclear since it does not alter the energy spectrum. However, in the presence of rotation, significant differences emerge between helical and non-helical turbulent flows. We first briefly outline some of the issues such as the partition of energy and helicity among modes. Using massive numerical simulations, we then show that smallscale structures and their intermittency properties differ according to whether helicity is present or not, in particular with respect to the emergence of Beltrami core vortices that are laminar helical vertical updraft vortices. These results point to the discovery of a small parameter besides the Rossby number, a fact that would relate the problem of rotating helical turbulence to that of critical phenomena, through the renormalization group and weak-turbulence theory. This parameter can be associated with the adimensionalized ratio of the energy to helicity flux to small scales, the three-dimensional energy cascade being weak and self-similar. copy; 2010 The Royal Society.

Descripción: The formation of coherent structures in turbulence is a signature of a developing cascade and therefore might be observable by analyzing inner heliospheric solar wind turbulence. To test this idea, data from the Helios 2 mission, for six streams of solar wind at different heliocentric distances and of different velocities, were subjected to statistical analysis using the partial variance of increments (PVI) approach. We see a clear increase of the PVI distribution function versus solar wind age for higher PVI cutoff, indicating development of non-Gaussian coherent structures. The plausibility of this interpretation is confirmed by a similar behavior observed in two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics simulation data at corresponding dimensionless nonlinear times. © 2012. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.

Descripción: A familiar feature of turbulence in a low collisionality turbulence is an increase in the electric field spectrum, relative to the magnetic field spectrum, at wavenumbers near the reciprocal of the ion inertial scale. This effect is commonly observed in the solar wind. Here we examine this feature numerically, using a variety of simulations, including compressible Hall MHD, incompressible Hall MHD, and one-, two-, and three-dimensional cases. A feature of this type is even found in a statistical Hall MHD model with no dissipation. This leads to the conclusion that the only requirement for obtaining this dispersive effect is the Hall term in the generalized Ohm's law. Therefore this observation does not distinguish between whistler and kinetic Alfvén waves, between waves and turbulence, nor even between fluid and kinetic plasma models. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.

Descripción: We review some of the recent results obtained in MHD turbulence, as encountered in many astrophysical objects.We focus attention on the lack of universality in such flows, including in the simplest case (no externally imposed magnetic field, no forcing, unit magnetic Prandtl number). Several parameters can foster such a breakdown of classical Kolmogorov scaling, such as the presence of velocity-magnetic field correlations, or of magnetic helicity and the role of the interplay between nonlinear eddies and Alfven waves. A link with avalanche processes is also discussed. These findings have led to the conjecture of the emergence of a new paradigm for MHD turbulence, as a possibly unsettled competition between several dynamical phenomena. © International Astronomical Union 2011.

Descripción: In recent analyses of numerical simulation and solar wind dataset, the idea that the magnetic discontinuities may be related to intermittent structures that appear spontaneously in MHD turbulence has been explored in details. These studies are consistent with the hypothesis that discontinuity events founds in the solar wind might be of local origin as well, i.e. a by-product of the turbulent evolution of magnetic fluctuations. Using simulations of 2D MHD turbulence, we are exploring a possible link between tangential discontinuities and magnetic reconnection. The goal is to develop numerical algorithms that may be useful for solar wind applications. © 2011 International Astronomical Union.

Descripción: We examine turbulent flows in the presence of solid-body rotation and helical forcing in the framework of stochastic Schramm-Löwner evolution (SLE) curves. The data stem from a run with 15363 grid points, with Reynolds and Rossby numbers of, respectively, 5100 and 0.06. We average the parallel component of the vorticity in the direction parallel to that of rotation and examine the resulting ω z field for scaling properties of its zero-value contours. We find for the first time for three-dimensional fluid turbulence evidence of nodal curves being conformal invariant, belonging to a SLE class with associated Brownian diffusivity κ=3.6±0.1. SLE behavior is related to the self-similarity of the direct cascade of energy to small scales and to the partial bidimensionalization of the flow because of rotation. We recover the value of κ with a heuristic argument and show that this is consistent with several nontrivial SLE predictions. © 2011 American Physical Society.

Descripción: We present numerical evidence on how three-dimensionalization is recovered at small scale in rotating turbulence with helical forcing provided by a Beltrami flow. The relevant ranges (large-scale inverse cascade of energy, anisotropic and isotropic direct cascades of energy and helicity, dissipative) are each moderately resolved. These results stem from large direct numerical simulations on grids of either 15363 or 30723 points. In the latter case, the scale at which the inertial wave time and the eddy turn-over time are equal is found to be more than one order of magnitude larger than the dissipation scale. We also examine how the presence of such an intermediate scale could affect truncation due to the use of a helical spectral Large Eddy Simulation procedure which can allow for extending the analysis to a wider range of parameters. Finally, the self-similarity of the direct cascade of energy to small scales for rotating flows, observed recently in numerical simulations as well as in several laboratory experiments, will be discussed briefly for its scaling properties and its conformal invariance.

Descripción: Fil:Dmitruk, P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: Fil:Dmitruk, P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: Fil:Dmitruk, P. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina.

Descripción: We study the intermittency properties of the energy and helicity cascades in two 15363 direct numerical simulations of helical rotating turbulence. Symmetric and antisymmetric velocity increments are examinedas well as probability density functions of the velocity field and of the helicity density. It is found that the direct cascade of energy to small scales is scale invariant and nonintermittentwhereas the direct cascade of helicity is highly intermittent. Furthermorethe study of structure functions of different orders allows us to identify a recovery of isotropy of strong events at very small scales in the flow. Finallywe observe the juxtaposition in space of strong laminar and persistent helical columns next to time-varying vortex tanglesthe former being associated with the self-similarity of energy and the latter with the intermittency of helicity. © 2010 American Institute of Physics.