Shear-driven flows in 2D Hall-MHD

CECILIA BEJARANO; DANIEL GÓMEZ

Foz de Iguazú

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

[Proceeding correspondiente al poster titulado "Shear-driven flow in Hall-MHD plasmas".] The large-scale dynamics of plasmas is well described within the framework of magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). However, in several astrophysical plasma processes, in which electrons are frozen to the magnetic field but ions are not, the Hall effect becomes important. The influence of the large-scale velocity on small-scale instabilities, which are essential to understand the transport properties, is often approximated by a linear shear. In this paper we study the role of the Hall effect on plasmas embedded in large-scale shear flow in a two-dimensional model. We perform a linear analysis and compare these results with numerical simulations. We find that shear flows with Hall effect might lead to the so called Hall magneto-shear instability (Hall-MSI).