Non-locality of Hydrodynamic and Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence

TL;DR

This paper compares the non-local interactions in hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic turbulence, revealing that non-locality is significantly more prominent in MHD turbulence, which impacts energy transfer processes.

Contribution

It provides a direct numerical comparison of non-locality in HD and MHD turbulence, highlighting the greater significance of non-local interactions in MHD.

Findings

Non-local interactions account for over 10% of total in MHD turbulence.

No significant non-locality observed in HD turbulence at the same resolution.

Non-locality influences the energy spectrum in turbulent flows.

Abstract

We compare non-locality of interactions between different scales in hydrodynamic (HD) turbulence and magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in a strongly magnetized medium. We use 3-dimensional incompressible direct numerical simulations to evaluate non-locality of interactions. Our results show that non-locality in MHD turbulence is much more pronounced than that in HD turbulence. Roughly speaking, non-local interactions count for more than 10\% of total interactions in our MHD simulation on a grid of $512^3$ points. However, there is no evidence that non-local interactions are important in our HD simulation with the same numerical resolution. We briefly discuss how non-locality affects energy spectrum.