Density-shear instability in electron magneto-hydrodynamics
- Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT (United Kingdom)
- Department of Physics, Purdue University, 525 Northwestern Avenue, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-2036 (United States)
We discuss a novel instability in inertia-less electron magneto-hydrodynamics (EMHD), which arises from a combination of electron velocity shear and electron density gradients. The unstable modes have a lengthscale longer than the transverse density scale, and a growth-rate of the order of the inverse Hall timescale. We suggest that this density-shear instability may be of importance in magnetic reconnection regions on scales smaller than the ion skin depth, and in neutron star crusts. We demonstrate that the so-called Hall drift instability, previously argued to be relevant in neutron star crusts, is a resistive tearing instability rather than an instability of the Hall term itself. We argue that the density-shear instability is of greater significance in neutron stars than the tearing instability, because it generally has a faster growth-rate and is less sensitive to geometry and boundary conditions. We prove that, for uniform electron density, EMHD is “at least as stable” as regular, incompressible MHD, in the sense that any field configuration that is stable in MHD is also stable in EMHD. We present a connection between the density-shear instability in EMHD and the magneto-buoyancy instability in anelastic MHD.
- OSTI ID:
- 22300157
- Journal Information:
- Physics of Plasmas, Vol. 21, Issue 5; Other Information: (c) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1070-664X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Analysis of dynamics, stability, and flow fields' structure of an accelerated hydrodynamic discontinuity with interfacial mass flux by a general matrix method
Resistive magnetohydrodynamic studies of tearing mode instability with equilibrium shear flow and magnetic reconnection