Neutrino magnetohydrodynamics

A new neutrino magnetohydrodynamics (NMHD) model is formulated, where the effects of the charged weak current on the electron-ion magnetohydrodynamic fluid are taken into account. The model incorporates in a systematic way the role of the Fermi neutrino weak force in magnetized plasmas. A fast neutrino-driven short wavelengths instability associated with the magnetosonic wave is derived. Such an instability should play a central role in strongly magnetized plasma as occurs in supernovae, where dense neutrino beams also exist. In addition, in the case of nonlinear or high frequency waves, the neutrino coupling is shown to be responsible for breaking the frozen-in magnetic field lines condition even in infinite conductivity plasmas. Simplified and ideal NMHD assumptions were adopted and analyzed in detail

Anomalous Magnetohydrodynamics

Anomalous symmetries induce currents which can be parallel rather than orthogonal to the hypermagnetic field. Building on the analogy with charged liquids at high magnetic Reynolds numbers, the persistence of anomalous currents is scrutinized for parametrically large conductivities when the plasma approximation is accurate. Different examples in globally neutral systems suggest that the magnetic configurations minimizing the energy density with the constraint that the helicity be conserved coincide, in the perfectly conducting limit, with the ones obtainable in ideal magnetohydrodynamics where the anomalous currents are neglected. It is argued that this is the rationale for the ability of extending to anomalous magnetohydrodynamics the hydromagnetic solutions characterized by finite gyrotropy. The generally covariant aspects of the problem are addressed with particular attention to conformally flat geometries which are potentially relevant for the description of the electroweak plasma prior to the phase transition.Comment: 25 pages, no figure

Lagrangian analysis of alignment dynamics for isentropic compressible magnetohydrodynamics

After a review of the isentropic compressible magnetohydrodynamics (ICMHD) equations, a quaternionic framework for studying the alignment dynamics of a general fluid flow is explained and applied to the ICMHD equations.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, submitted to a Focus Issue of New Journal of Physics on "Magnetohydrodynamics and the Dynamo Problem" J-F Pinton, A Pouquet, E Dormy and S Cowley, editor