Universal turbulent relaxation of fluids and plasmas by the principle of vanishing nonlinear transfers

Abstract

A seventy year old problem of fluid and plasma relaxation has been revisited. A new principle of vanishing nonlinear transfer has been proposed to develop a unified theory of turbulent relaxation of neutral fluids and plasmas. Unlike previous studies, the new principle enables us to find the relaxed states unambiguously without going through any variational principle. The general relaxed states obtained herein are found to support naturally a pressure gradient which is consistent with several numerical studies. Relaxed states are reduced to Beltrami type aligned states where the pressure gradient is negligibly small.