The many faces of shear Alfvén waves

Gekelman, W.; Vincena, S.; Van Compernolle, B.; Morales, G. J.; Maggs, J. E.; Pribyl, P.; Carter, T. A.

doi:doi:10.1063/1.3592210

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Foreword to Special Issue: Papers from the 52nd Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Plasma Physics, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2010

We present in this Special Issue of Physics of Plasmas the review, tutorial, and invited papers of the 2010 Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s (APS) Division of Plasma Physics. This was the 52nd year of this meeting, and it was held in Chicago, Illinois on 8–12 November 2010. The meeting program was made up of over 100 review, tutorial, and invited oral presentations, and a significant fraction of these speakers prepared manuscripts which were peer-reviewed and are contained in t...

Relativistic generation of vortex and magnetic field

The implications of the recently demonstrated relativistic mechanism for generating generalized vorticity in purely ideal dynamics [Mahajan and Yoshida, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 095005 (2010)] are worked out. The said mechanism has its origin in the space-time distortion caused by the demands of special relativity; these distortions break the topological constraint (conservation of generalized helicity) forbidding the emergence of magnetic field (a generalized vorticity) in an ideal nonrelativisti...

One of the fundamental waves in magnetized plasmas is the shear Alfvén wave. This wave is responsible for rearranging current systems and, in fact all low frequency currents in magnetized plasmas are shear waves. It has become apparent that Alfvén waves are important in a wide variety of physical environments. Shear waves of various forms have been a topic of experimental research for more than fifteen years in the large plasma device (LAPD) at UCLA. The waves were first studied in both the kinetic and inertial regimes when excited by fluctuating currents with transverse dimension on the order of the collisionless skin depth. Theory and experiment on wave propagation in these regimes is presented, and the morphology of the wave is illustrated to be dependent on the generation mechanism. Three-dimensional currents associated with the waves have been mapped. The ion motion, which closes the current across the magnetic field, has been studied using laser induced fluorescence. The wave propagation in inhomogeneous magnetic fields and density gradients is presented as well as effects of collisions and reflections from boundaries. Reflections may result in Alfvénic field line resonances and in the right conditions maser action. The waves occur spontaneously on temperature and density gradients as hybrids with drift waves. These have been seen to affect cross-field heat and plasma transport. Although the waves are easily launched with antennas, they may also be generated by secondary processes, such as Cherenkov radiation. This is the case when intense shear Alfvén waves in a background magnetoplasma are produced by an exploding laser-produced plasma. Time varying magnetic flux ropes can be considered to be low frequency shear waves. Studies of the interaction of multiple ropes and the link between magnetic field line reconnection and rope dynamics are revealed. This manuscript gives us an overview of the major results from these experiments and provides a modern prospective for the earlier studies of shear Alfvén waves.

Article Outline

INTRODUCTION AND THEORY
EARLY ALFVÉN WAVE EXPERIMENTS
THE LARGE PLASMA DEVICE
ALFVÉN WAVES FROM NARROW CURRENT FILAMENTS
THE MORPHOLOGY OF SHEAR WAVES LAUNCHED FROM VARIOUS ANTENNAS
FIELD LINE RESONANCES
MAGNETIC BEACH
ALFVÉN WAVE MASER
ALFVÉN GAP MODES
DRIFT-ALFVÉN WAVES AND TRANSPORT
NONLINEAR ALFVÉN WAVES
ALFVÉN WAVES FROM DENSE EXPANDING PLASMAS
MAGNETIC FLUX ROPES
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

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KEYWORDS and PACS

Keywords

magnetic reconnection, plasma Alfven waves, plasma devices, plasma drift waves, plasma fluctuations, plasma kinetic theory, plasma magnetohydrodynamics, plasma production by laser, plasma transport processes

PACS

52.35.Bj

Magnetohydrodynamic waves (e.g., Alfven waves)
52.25.Fi

Transport properties
52.25.Gj

Fluctuation and chaos phenomena
52.30.Cv

Magnetohydrodynamics (including electron magnetohydrodynamics)
52.35.Vd

Magnetic reconnection
52.35.Kt

Drift waves

ARTICLE DATA

Digital Object Identifier

http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3592210

PUBLICATION DATA

ISSN

1070-664X (print)

1089-7674 (online)

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American Institute of Physics

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