Small-scale chaotic dynamo and spontaneous breaking of local reflectional symmetry in magnetohydrodynamics

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through direct numerical simulations that spontaneous local reflectional symmetry breaking significantly influences small-scale magnetohydrodynamic dynamo chaos across various astrophysical and laboratory flows, with implications for solar phenomena.

Contribution

It reveals the dominance of symmetry breaking in small-scale MHD dynamo chaos and introduces the concepts of deterministic and helical distributed chaos in this context.

Findings

Symmetry breaking influences chaotic MHD dynamo behavior.

Large- and small-scale dynamo coexistence observed.

Applications to solar photosphere regions discussed.

Abstract

It is shown, using results of direct numerical simulations, that the spontaneous breaking of local reflectional symmetry (and corresponding localized kinetic and magnetic helicities) can dominate chaotic dynamics of the small-scale MHD dynamo in the Rayleigh-B{\'e}nard convection, in kinetically forced flows under strong stratification, in the near-surface solar convection, and in kinetically forced flows at large magnetic Reynolds numbers. The notions of deterministic and helical distributed chaos have been used for this purpose. The coexistence of large- and small-scale dynamo mechanisms and applications of the obtained results to quiet and active regions of the solar photosphere have been briefly discussed.