15,659 research outputs found
Magnetic Reconnection and Turbulent Mixing: From ISM to Clusters of Galaxies
Magnetic reconnection, or the ability of the magnetic field lines that are
frozen in plasma to change their topology, is a fundamental problem of
magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). We briefly examine the problem starting with the
well-known Sweet-Parker scheme, discuss effects of tearing modes, anomalous
resistivity and the concept of hyperresistivity. We show that the field
stochasticity by itself provides a way to enable fast reconnection even if, at
the scale of individual turbulent wiggles, the reconnection happens at the slow
Sweet-Parker rate. We show that fast reconnection allows efficient mixing of
magnetic field in the direction perpendicular to the local direction of
magnetic field. While the idea of stochastic reconnection still requires
numerical confirmation, our numerical simulations testify that mixing motions
perpendicular to the local magnetic field are up to high degree hydrodynamical.
This suggests that the turbulent heat transport should be similar to that in
non-magnetized turbulent fluid, namely, should have a diffusion coefficient
\sim LV_L, where V_L is the amplitude of the turbulent velocity and L is the
scale of the turbulent motions. We present numerical simulations which support
this conclusion. The application of this idea to thermal conductivity in
clusters of galaxies shows that this mechanism may dominate the diffusion of
heat and may be efficient enough to prevent cooling flow formation.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, invited talk at JENAM2002 - The Unsolved
Universe:Challenges for the Future (v2: minor changes
Contour integral method for obtaining the self-energy matrices of electrodes in electron transport calculations
We propose an efficient computational method for evaluating the self-energy
matrices of electrodes to study ballistic electron transport properties in
nanoscale systems. To reduce the high computational cost incurred in large
systems, a contour integral eigensolver based on the Sakurai-Sugiura method
combined with the shifted biconjugate gradient method is developed to solve
exponential-type eigenvalue problem for complex wave vectors. A remarkable
feature of the proposed algorithm is that the numerical procedure is very
similar to that of conventional band structure calculations. We implement the
developed method in the framework of the real-space higher-order finite
difference scheme with nonlocal pseudopotentials. Numerical tests for a wide
variety of materials validate the robustness, accuracy, and efficiency of the
proposed method. As an illustration of the method, we present the electron
transport property of the free-standing silicene with the line defect
originating from the reversed buckled phases.Comment: 36 pages, 13 figures, 2 table
Resolving the fine-scale structure in turbulent Rayleigh-Benard convection
We present high-resolution direct numerical simulation studies of turbulent
Rayleigh-Benard convection in a closed cylindrical cell with an aspect ratio of
one. The focus of our analysis is on the finest scales of convective
turbulence, in particular the statistics of the kinetic energy and thermal
dissipation rates in the bulk and the whole cell. The fluctuations of the
energy dissipation field can directly be translated into a fluctuating local
dissipation scale which is found to develop ever finer fluctuations with
increasing Rayleigh number. The range of these scales as well as the
probability of high-amplitude dissipation events decreases with increasing
Prandtl number. In addition, we examine the joint statistics of the two
dissipation fields and the consequences of high-amplitude events. We also have
investigated the convergence properties of our spectral element method and have
found that both dissipation fields are very sensitive to insufficient
resolution. We demonstrate that global transport properties, such as the
Nusselt number, and the energy balances are partly insensitive to insufficient
resolution and yield correct results even when the dissipation fields are
under-resolved. Our present numerical framework is also compared with
high-resolution simulations which use a finite difference method. For most of
the compared quantities the agreement is found to be satisfactory.Comment: 33 pages, 24 figure
Fornax: a Flexible Code for Multiphysics Astrophysical Simulations
This paper describes the design and implementation of our new multi-group,
multi-dimensional radiation hydrodynamics (RHD) code Fornax and provides a
suite of code tests to validate its application in a wide range of physical
regimes. Instead of focusing exclusively on tests of neutrino radiation
hydrodynamics relevant to the core-collapse supernova problem for which Fornax
is primarily intended, we present here classical and rigorous demonstrations of
code performance relevant to a broad range of multi-dimensional hydrodynamic
and multi-group radiation hydrodynamic problems. Our code solves the
comoving-frame radiation moment equations using the M1 closure, utilizes
conservative high-order reconstruction, employs semi-explicit matter and
radiation transport via a high-order time stepping scheme, and is suitable for
application to a wide range of astrophysical problems. To this end, we first
describe the philosophy, algorithms, and methodologies of Fornax and then
perform numerous stringent code tests, that collectively and vigorously
exercise the code, demonstrate the excellent numerical fidelity with which it
captures the many physical effects of radiation hydrodynamics, and show
excellent strong scaling well above 100k MPI tasks.Comment: Accepted to the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series; A few more
textual and reference updates; As before, one additional code test include
On the Divergence-Free Condition in Godunov-Type Schemes for Ideal Magnetohydrodynamics: the Upwind Constrained Transport Method
We present a general framework to design Godunov-type schemes for
multidimensional ideal magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) systems, having the
divergence-free relation and the related properties of the magnetic field B as
built-in conditions. Our approach mostly relies on the 'Constrained Transport'
(CT) discretization technique for the magnetic field components, originally
developed for the linear induction equation, which assures div(B)=0 and its
preservation in time to within machine accuracy in a finite-volume setting. We
show that the CT formalism, when fully exploited, can be used as a general
guideline to design the reconstruction procedures of the B vector field, to
adapt standard upwind procedures for the momentum and energy equations,
avoiding the onset of numerical monopoles of O(1) size, and to formulate
approximate Riemann solvers for the induction equation. This general framework
will be named here 'Upwind Constrained Transport' (UCT). To demonstrate the
versatility of our method, we apply it to a variety of schemes, which are
finally validated numerically and compared: a novel implementation for the MHD
case of the second order Roe-type positive scheme by Liu and Lax (J. Comp.
Fluid Dynam. 5, 133, 1996), and both the second and third order versions of a
central-type MHD scheme presented by Londrillo and Del Zanna (Astrophys. J.
530, 508, 2000), where the basic UCT strategies have been first outlined
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