Coarse-grained incompressible magnetohydrodynamics: analyzing the turbulent cascades

Abstract

We formulate a coarse-graining approach to the dynamics of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) fluids at a continuum of length-scales ℓ. In this methodology, effective equations are derived for the observable velocity and magnetic fields spatially-averaged at an arbitrary scale of resolution. The microscopic equations for the ‘bare’ velocity and magnetic fields are ‘renormalized’ by coarse-graining to yield macroscopic effective equations that contain both a subscale stress and a subscale electromotive force (EMF) generated by nonlinear interaction of eliminated fields and plasma motions. Particular attention is given to the effects of these subscale terms on the balances of the quadratic invariants of ideal incompressible MHD—energy, cross-helicity and magnetic helicity. At large coarse-graining length-scales, the direct dissipation of the invariants by microscopic mechanisms (such as molecular viscosity and Spitzer resistivity) is shown to be negligible. The balance at large scales is dominated instead by the subscale nonlinear terms, which can transfer invariants across scales, and are interpreted in terms of work concepts for energy and in terms of topological flux-linkage for the two helicities. An important application of this approach is to MHD turbulence, where the coarse-graining length ℓ lies in the inertial cascade range. We show that in the case of sufficiently rough velocity and/or magnetic fields, the nonlinear inter-scale transfer need not vanish and can persist to arbitrarily small scales. Although closed expressions are not available for subscale stress and subscale EMF, we derive rigorous upper bounds on the effective dissipation they produce in terms of scaling exponents of the velocity and magnetic fields. These bounds provide exact constraints on phenomenological theories of MHD turbulence in order to allow the nonlinear cascade of energy and cross-helicity. On the other hand, we prove a very strong version of the Woltjer-Taylor conjecture on conservation of magnetic helicity. Our bounds show that forward cascade of magnetic helicity to asymptotically small scales is impossible unless 3rd-order moments of either velocity or magnetic field become infinite.