Statistical properties of three-dimensional Hall magnetohydrodynamics turbulence

Abstract

The three-dimensional (3D) Hall magnetohydrodynamics (HMHD) equations are often used to study turbulence in the solar wind. Some earlier studies have investigated the statistical properties of 3D HMHD turbulence by using simple shell models or pseudospectral direct numerical simulations (DNSs) of the 3D HMHD equations; these DNSs have been restricted to modest spatial resolutions and have covered a limited parameter range. To explore the dependence of 3D HMHD turbulence on the Reynolds number Re and the ion-inertial scale di, we have carried out detailed pseudospectral DNSs of the 3D HMHD equations and their counterparts for 3D MHD (di = 0). We present several statistical properties of 3D HMHD turbulence, which we compare with 3D MHD turbulence by calculating (a) the temporal evolution of the energy-dissipation rates and the energy; (b) the wave-number dependence of fluid and magnetic spectra; (c) the probability distribution functions of the cosines of the angles between various pairs of vectors, such as the velocity and the magnetic field; and (d) various measures of the intermittency in 3D HMHD and 3D MHD turbulence.