The Alf'ven Effect and Conformal Field Theory

Abstract

Noting that two-dimensional magnetohydrodynamics can be modeled by conformal field theory, we argue that when the Alf'ven effect is also taken into account one is naturally lead to consider conformal field theories, which have logarithmic terms in their correlation functions. We discuss the implications of such logarithmic terms in the context of magnetohydrodynamics, and derive a relationship between conformal dimensions of the velocity stream function, the magnetic flux function and the Reynolds number.