Nonperturbative quasilinear approach to the shear dynamo problem

TL;DR

This paper develops a nonperturbative quasilinear framework to analyze large-scale magnetic field generation in turbulent shear flows, revealing the absence of shear-current effects in non-helical turbulence and deriving solutions describing shearing wave evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a nonperturbative quasilinear approach to the shear dynamo problem, showing the absence of shear-current effects in non-helical turbulence and deriving shearing wave solutions.

Findings

Shearing waves can grow temporarily but decay over time.

No shear-current effect exists for non-helical turbulence in this framework.

The approach is valid for any Galilean-invariant velocity field.

Abstract

We study large-scale dynamo action due to turbulence in the presence of a linear shear flow. Our treatment is quasilinear and equivalent to the standard `first order smoothing approximation'. However it is non perturbative in the shear strength. We first derive an integro-differential equation for the evolution of the mean magnetic field, by systematic use of the shearing coordinate transformation and the Galilean invariance of the linear shear flow. We show that, for non helical turbulence, the time evolution of the cross-shear components of the mean field do not depend on any other components excepting themselves; this is valid for any Galilean-invariant velocity field, independent of its dynamics. Hence, to all orders in the shear parameter, there is no shear-current type effect for non helical turbulence in a linear shear flow, in quasilinear theory in the limit of zero resistivity. We then develop a systematic approximation of the integro-differential equation for the case when the mean magnetic field varies slowly compared to the turbulence correlation time. For non-helical turbulence, the resulting partial differential equations can again be solved by making a shearing coordinate transformation in Fourier space. The resulting solutions are in the form of shearing waves, labeled by the wavenumber in the sheared coordinates. These shearing waves can grow at early and intermediate times but are expected to decay in the long time limit.