Steady fall of isothermal, resistive-viscous, compressible fluid across magnetic field

Abstract

This is a basic MHD study of the steady fall of an infinite, vertical slab of isothermal, resistive-viscous, compressible fluid across a dipped magnetic field in uniform gravity. This double-diffusion steady flow in unbounded space poses a nonlinear but numerically tractable, one-dimensional (1D) free-boundary problem, assuming constant coefficients of resistivity and viscosity. The steady flow is determined by a dimensionless number μ1 proportional to the triple product of the two diffusion coefficients and the square of the linear total mass. For a sufficiently large μ1, the Lorentz, viscous, fluid-pressure, and gravitational forces pack and collimate the fluid into a steady flow of a finite width defined by the two zero-pressure free-boundaries of the slab with vacuum. The viscous force is essential in this collimation effect. The study conjectures that in the regime μ1→0, the 1D steady state exists only for μ1∈Ω, a spectrum of an infinite number of discrete values, including μ1 = 0 that corresponds to two steady states, the classical zero-resistivity static slab of Kippenhahn and Schlüter [R. Kippenhahn and A. Schlüter, Z. Astrophys. 43, 36 (1957)] and its recent generalization [B. C. Low et al., Astrophys. J. 755, 34 (2012)] to admit an inviscid resistive flow. The pair of zero-pressure boundaries of each of the μ1→0 steady-state slabs are located at infinity. Computational evidence suggests that the Ω steady-states are densely distributed around μ1 = 0, as an accumulation point, but are sparsely separated by open intervals of μ1-values for which the slab must be either time-dependent or spatially multi-dimensional. The widths of these intervals are vanishingly small as μ1→0. This topological structure of physical states is similar to that described by Landau and Liftshitz [L. D. Landau and E. M. Lifshitz, Fluid Mechanics (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1959)] to explain the onset of hydrodynamic turbulence. The implications of this MHD study are discussed, with an interest in the prominences in the solar atmosphere and the interstellar clouds in the Galaxy.