Proof of the zeroth law of turbulence in one-dimensional compressible magnetohydrodynamics and shock heating

Abstract

The zeroth law is one of the oldest conjecture in turbulence that is still unproven. Here, we consider weak solutions of one-dimensional compressible magnetohydrodynamics and demonstrate that the lack of smoothness of the fields introduces a new dissipative term, named inertial dissipation, into the expression of energy conservation that is neither viscous nor resistive in nature. We propose exact solutions assuming that the kinematic viscosity and the magnetic diffusivity are equal, and we demonstrate that the associated inertial dissipation is positive and equal on average to the mean viscous dissipation rate in the limit of small viscosity, proving the conjecture of the zeroth law of turbulence and the existence of an anomalous dissipation. As an illustration, we evaluate the shock heating produced by discontinuities detected by Voyager in the solar wind around 5 AU. We deduce a heating rate of $\sim 10^{-18}$J m${}^{-3}$ s${}^{-1}$, which is significantly higher than the value obtained from the turbulent fluctuations. This suggests that collisionless shocks can be a dominant source of heating in the outer solar wind.

8 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Convective mesoscale turbulence at very low Prandtl numbers
• Local cascade and dissipation in incompressible Hall magnetohydrodynamic turbulence: the Coarse-Graining approach
• Energy transfer, discontinuities and heating in the inner solar wind measured with a weak and local formulation of the Politano-Pouquet law