Axisymmetric equilibria of a gravitating plasma with incompressible flows

Abstract

It is found that the ideal magnetohydrodynamic equilibrium of an axisymmetric gravitating magnetically confined plasma with incompressible flows is governed by a second-order elliptic differential equation for the poloidal magnetic flux function containing five flux functions coupled with a Poisson equation for the gravitation potential, and an algebraic relation for the pressure. This set of equations is amenable to analytic solutions. As an application, the magnetic-dipole static axisymmetric equilibria with vanishing poloidal plasma currents derived recently by Krasheninnikov, Catto, and Hazeltine [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 82}, 2689 (1999)] are extended to plasmas with finite poloidal currents, subject to gravitating forces from a massive body (a star or black hole) and inertial forces due to incompressible sheared flows. Explicit solutions are obtained in two regimes: (a) in the low-energy regime $β_0\approx γ_0\approx δ_0 \approxε_0\ll 1$, where $β_0$, $γ_0$, $δ_0$, and $ε_0$ are related to the thermal, poloidal-current, flow and gravitating energies normalized to the poloidal-magnetic-field energy, respectively, and (b) in the high-energy regime $β_0\approx γ_0\approx δ_0 \approxε_0\gg 1$. It turns out that in the high-energy regime all four forces, pressure-gradient, toroidal-magnetic-field, inertial, and gravitating contribute equally to the formation of magnetic surfaces very extended and localized about the symmetry plane such that the resulting equilibria resemble the accretion disks in astrophysics.