On the nature of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence

A novel model of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in the presence of a strong external magnetic field is proposed for the explanation of recent numerical results. According to the proposed model, in the presence of the strong external magnetic field, incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence becomes nonlocal in the sense that low-frequency modes cause decorrelation of interacting high-frequency modes from the inertial interval. It is shown that the obtained nonlocal spectrum of the inertial range of incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence represents an anisotropic analogue of Kraichnan's nonlocal spectrum of hydrodynamic turbulence. Based on the analysis performed in the framework of the weak-coupling approximation, which represents one of the equivalent formulations of the direct interaction approximation, it is shown that incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence could be both local and nonlocal, and therefore anisotropic analogues of both the Kolmogorov and Kraichnan spectra are realizable in incompressible magnetohydrodynamic turbulence.(c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.