Hall effect on magnetohydrodynamic instabilities at an elliptic magnetic stagnation line

Abstract

To answer the question whether the Hall effect removes the unphysical feature of ideal magnetohydrodynamics of predicting small wavelength kink instabilities at any elliptic magnetic stagnation line, a normal mode analysis is performed of the motion of an incompressible Hall fluid about cylindrical Z-pinch equilibria with circular cross sections. The eigenvalue loci in the complex frequency plane are derived for the equilibrium with constant current density. Every particular mode becomes stable as the Hall parameter exceeds a critical value. This value, however, depends on the mode such that it increases to infinity as the ideal growth rate decreases to zero, implying that there always remains an infinite number of slowly growing instabilities. Correspondingly, the stability criterion for equilibria with arbitrary current distributions is independent of the Hall parameter.