Magnetic reconnection in magnetohydrodynamics (Q7006404)

The authors consider the magnetohydrodynamics system: \(\partial _{t}u+(u\cdot \nabla )u+\nabla P=\nu \Delta u+(b\cdot \nabla )b\), \(\partial _{t}b+(u\cdot \nabla )b=(b\cdot \nabla )u+\eta \Delta b\), \(\operatorname{div}u=\operatorname{div}b=0\), \( u(0,\cdot )=u_{0}\), \(b(0,\cdot )=b_{0}\), where \(b:(0,T)\times \mathbb{T} ^{d}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d}\), \(d=2,3\), is the magnetic field in a resistive and incompressible fluid with velocity \(u:(0,T)\times \mathbb{T} ^{d}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}^{d}\), \(P:(0,T)\times \mathbb{T}^{d}\rightarrow \mathbb{R}\) the pressure, \(\nu \geq 0\) the viscosity and \(\eta \geq 0\) the resistivity. The paper analyzes a magnetic reconnection problem and the main result proves that for any positive viscosity \(\nu \) and resistivity \(\eta \) and any positive constants \(T\) and \(M\), there exists a zero-average unique global and smooth solution.\((u,b)\) to the above problem on \(\mathbb{T}^{d}\), with initial datum.\((0\), \(b_{0})\) and \(\left\Vert b_{0}\right\Vert _{L^{2}}=M \), such that the magnetic lines at time \(t=0\) and \(t=T\) are not topologically equivalent, that is there is no homeomorphism of \(\mathbb{T} ^{d}\) into itself mapping the magnetic lines of \(b(0,\cdot )\) into those of \( b(0,T)\). The authors observe that the condition \(\eta >0\) is necessary to prove magnetic reconnection for smooth solutions, because Alfvén's theorem implies this is forbidden for \(\eta =0\). They recall properties of Beltrami fields. They prove the stability of regular solutions to the magnetohydrodynamics system in the 3D case. In this 3D case, they first build a global smooth solution using two Beltrami fields that involve some parameters, they prove estimates on this global solution, they chose appropriate values of the parameters and they rescale the initial data. In the 2D case, the authors recall properties of Hamiltonian vector fields and Taylor vortices. They prove a stability result for the magnetohydrodynamics system in this 2D case and some estimates. They finally prove the magnetic reconnection in the 2D case, first considering a small velocity, then a large velocity. The paper ends with an example of instantaneous magnetic reconnection in the 3D case.