Generalized phase mixing: Turbulence-like behaviour from unidirectionally propagating MHD waves

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that generalized phase mixing of unidirectionally propagating MHD waves in a homogeneous plasma can produce turbulence-like behavior and complex current structures, expanding understanding of turbulence generation in astrophysical plasmas.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized phase mixing mechanism that leads to turbulence-like phenomena in a longitudinally homogeneous plasma, a novel insight in MHD wave dynamics.

Findings

Turbulence-like behavior observed in 3D MHD simulations.

Formation of complex current-sheet structures.

Generalized phase mixing relaxes previous conditions for turbulence generation.

Abstract

We present the results of three-dimensional (3D) ideal magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations on the dynamics of a perpendicularly inhomogeneous plasma disturbed by propagating Alfv\'enic waves. Simpler versions of this scenario have been extensively studied as the phenomenon of phase mixing. We show that, by generalizing the textbook version of phase mixing, interesting phenomena are obtained, such as turbulence-like behavior and complex current-sheet structure, a novelty in longitudinally homogeneous plasma excited by unidirectionally propagating waves. This constitutes an important finding for turbulence-related phenomena in astrophysics in general, relaxing the conditions that have to be fulfilled in order to generate turbulent behavior.