Strong anisotropy in quasi-static MHD turbulence for high interaction parameters

Abstract

We simulate forced quasi-static magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and investigate the anisotropy, energy spectrum, and energy flux of the flow, specially for large interaction parameters (N). We show that the angular dependence of the energy spectrum is well quantified using Legendre polynomials. For large N, the energy spectrum is exponential. Our direct computation of energy flux reveals an inverse cascade of energy at low wavenumbers, similar to that in two-dimensional turbulence. We observe the flow be two-dimensional (2D) for moderate N (N ~ 20), and two-dimensional three-component (2D-3C) type for N >= 27. In our forced simulation, the transition from 2D to 2D-3C occurs at higher value of N than Favier et al. (2010), who employ decaying simulations.