Dynamics of vortex and magnetic lines in ideal hydrodynamics and MHD

Abstract

Vortex line and magnetic line representations are introduced for description of flows in ideal hydrodynamics and MHD, respectively. For incompressible fluids it is shown that the equations of motion for vorticity ${\bf Ω}$ and magnetic field with the help of this transformation follow from the variational principle. By means of this representation it is possible to integrate the system of hydrodynamic type with the Hamiltonian ${\cal{H}}=\int |{\bf Ω}| d{\bf r}$. It is also demonstrated that these representations allow to remove from the noncanonical Poisson brackets, defined on the space of divergence-free vector fields, degeneracy connected with the vorticity frozenness for the Euler equation and with magnetic field frozenness for ideal MHD. For MHD a new Weber type transformation is found. It is shown how this transformation can be obtained from the two-fluid model when electrons and ions can be considered as two independent fluids. The Weber type transformation for ideal MHD gives the whole Lagrangian vector invariant. When this invariant is absent this transformation coincides with the Clebsch representation analog introduced by Zakharov and Kuznetov.