Strong Imbalanced Turbulence

Abstract

We consider stationary, forced, imbalanced, or cross-helical MHD Alfvenic turbulence where the waves traveling in one direction have higher amplitudes than the opposite waves. This paper is dedicated to so-called strong turbulence, which cannot be treated perturbatively. Our main result is that the anisotropy of the weak waves is stronger than the anisotropy of a strong waves. We propose that critical balance, which was originally conceived as a causality argument, has to be amended by what we call a propagation argument. This revised formulation of critical balance is able to handle the imbalanced case and reduces to old formulation in the balanced case. We also provide phenomenological model of energy cascading and discuss possibility of self-similar solutions in a realistic setup of driven turbulence.

this is shorter, 5 page version of what is to appear in ApJ 682, Aug. 1, 2008

References in corpus (3)

• The Statistics of Supersonic Isothermal Turbulence
• Imbalanced Strong MHD Turbulence
• On the Nature of Incompressible Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence

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• Studying Turbulence from Doppler-broadened Absorption Lines: Statistics of Logarithms of Intensity
• The Turbulent Heating Rate in Strong MHD Turbulence with Nonzero Cross Helicity
• Properties and selected implications of magnetic turbulence for interstellar medium, Local Bubble and solar wind