Driven waves in a two-fluid plasma

We study the physics of wave propagation in a weakly ionised plasma, as it applies to the formation of multifluid, MHD shock waves. We model the plasma as separate charged and neutral fluids which are coupled by ion-neutral friction. At times much less than the ion-neutral drag time, the fluids are decoupled and so evolve independently. At later times, the evolution is determined by the large inertial mismatch between the charged and neutral particles. The neutral flow continues to evolve independently; the charged flow is driven by and slaved to the neutral flow by friction. We calculate this driven flow analytically by considering the special but realistic case where the charged fluid obeys linearized equations of motion. We carry out an extensive analysis of linear, driven, MHD waves. The physics of driven MHD waves is embodied in certain Green functions which describe wave propagation on short time scales, ambipolar diffusion on long time scales, and transitional behavior at intermediate times. By way of illustration, we give an approximate solution for the formation of a multifluid shock during the collision of two identical interstellar clouds. The collision produces forward- and reverse J shocks in the neutral fluid and a transient in the charged fluid. The latter rapidly evolves into a pair of magnetic precursors on the J shocks, wherein the ions undergo force free motion and the magnetic field grows monotonically with time. The flow appears to be self similar at the time when linear analysis ceases to be valid.Comment: 18 pages including 24 figures, accepted by MNRA

An adiabatic approximation for grain alignment theory

The alignment of interstellar dust grains is described by the joint distribution function for certain ``internal'' and ``external'' variables, where the former describe the orientation of a grain's axes with respect to its angular momentum, J, and the latter describe the orientation of J relative to the interstellar magnetic field. I show how the large disparity between the dynamical timescales of the internal and external variables--- which is typically 2--3 orders of magnitude--- can be exploited to greatly simplify calculations of the required distribution. The method is based on an ``adiabatic approximation'' which closely resembles the Born-Oppenheimer approximation in quantum mechanics. The adiabatic approximation prescribes an analytic distribution function for the ``fast'' dynamical variables and a simplified Fokker-Planck equation for the ``slow'' variables which can be solved straightforwardly using various techniques. These solutions are accurate to order epsilon, where epsilon is the ratio of the fast and slow dynamical timescales. As a simple illustration of the method, I derive an analytic solution for the joint distribution established when Barnett relaxation acts in concert with gas damping. The statistics of the analytic solution agree with the results of laborious numerical calculations which do not exploit the adiabatic approximation.Comment: 22 pages (LaTeX+4 eps figs); accepted by MNRAS 6/30/9

Alien Registration- Roberge, Louis G. (Lewiston, Androscoggin County)

https://digitalmaine.com/alien_docs/27713/thumbnail.jp

Theory of grain alignment in molecular clouds

Research accomplishments are presented and include the following: (1) mathematical theory of grain alignment; (2) super-paramagnetic alignment of molecular cloud grains; and (3) theory of grain alignment by ambipolar diffusion

Cosmic rays and grain alignment

The recent detection of interstellar polarization in the solid CO feature near 4.67 micron shows that CO-mantled grains can be aligned in cold molecular clouds. These observations conflict with a theory of grain alignment which attributes the polarization in molecular clouds to the effects of cosmic rays: according to this theory, oblate spheroidal grains with H_2O and CO_2-dominated ice mantles are spun up to suprathermal energies by molecular evaporation from cosmic ray impact sites but spin up does not occur for CO-mantled grains. Motivated by this conflict, we reexamine the effects of cosmic rays on the alignment of icy grains. We show that the systematic torques produced by cosmic rays are insufficient to cause suprathermal spin. In principle, the random torques due to cosmic rays can enhance the efficiency of Davis-Greenstein alignment by raising the grain rotational temperature. However, a significant enhancement would require cosmic ray fluxes 6--7 orders of magnitude larger than the flux in a typical cold cloud.Comment: 14 pages, 1 figure. Accepted to MNRA