Phase-Mixing and Dissipation of Standing Shear Alfven waves

Abstract

We study the phase mixing and dissipation of a packet of standing shear Alfv\'en waves localized in a region with non-uniform Alfv\'en background velocity. We investigate the validity of the exponential damping law in time, $\exp(-At^3)$, presented by Heyvaerts & Priest (1983) for different ranges of Lundquist, $S$, and Reynolds, $R$, numbers. Our numerical results shows that it is valid for $(R,S)\geq 10^7$.