The spectrum of anomalous magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

The equations of anomalous magnetohydrodynamics describe an Abelian plasma where conduction and chiral currents are simultaneously present and constrained by the second law of thermodynamics. At high frequencies the magnetic currents play the leading role and the spectrum is dominated by two-fluid effects. The system behaves instead as a single fluid in the low-frequency regime where the vortical currents induce potentially large hypermagnetic fields. After deriving the physical solutions of the generalized Appleton-Hartree equation, the corresponding dispersion relations are scrutinized and compared with the results valid for cold plasmas. Hypermagnetic knots and fluid vortices can be concurrently present at very low frequencies and suggest a qualitatively different dynamics of the hydromagnetic nonlinearities.