Shear-driven flow in Hall-MHD plasmas

CECILIA BEJARANO; DANIEL GÓMEZ

Foz de Iguazú

Encuentro; Primera Reunión Argentino-Brasileña de Gravitación, Astrofísica y Cosmología; 2011

The large-scale dynamics of plasmas is well described within the framework of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). However, in several astrophysical plasma processes, the Hall effect is likely to be important whenever the ion density of the plasma becomes sufficiently low. The influence of the large-scale velocity on small-scale instabilities is often approximated by a linear shear. In particular, the development of small-scale instabilities is essential to understand the transport properties in a number of astrophysical plasmas. In this work we study the role of the Hall effect on plasmas embedded in large-scale shear in an axisymmetric model. We perform a linear analysis and compare these results with numerical simulations.