A new framework for magnetohydrodynamic simulations with anisotropic pressure

Abstract

We describe a new theoretical and numerical framework of the magnetohydrodynamic simulation incorporated with an anisotropic pressure tensor, which can play an important role in a collisionless plasma. A classical approach to handle the anisotropy is based on the double adiabatic approximation assuming that a pressure tensor is well described only by the components parallel and perpendicular to the local magnetic field. This gyrotropic assumption, however, fails around a magnetically neutral region, where the cyclotron period may get comparable to or even longer than a dynamical time in a system, and causes a singularity in the mathematical expression. In this paper, we demonstrate that this singularity can be completely removed away by the combination of direct use of the 2nd-moment of the Vlasov equation and an ingenious gyrotropization model. Numerical tests also verify that the present model properly reduces to the standard MHD or the double adiabatic formulation in an asymptotic manner under an appropriate limit.