Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence is responsible for many important astrophysics problems. For example, in the Sun, small scale magnetic fields can self-organize and generate large scale fields; in accreting disks, magnetorotational instability (MRI)-driven turbulence can transport angular momentum outward. Both of these phenomena can be described in terms of statistical properties of MHD turbulence. Although one-dimensional energy and helicity spectra are often shown, they could be misleading due to the anisotropic cascade in MHD turbulence. In this talk, I will first give a brief review of statistical theory of turbulence, which motivates the development a spectral MHD code. I will discuss some difficulty of applying spectral schemes to shearing systems, and derive a resolution. I will then propose a few analysis techniques to address the anisotropic cascade, and apply these techniques to study the turbulent solutions from the code.