Dynamics of fluctuating magnetic fields in turbulent dynamos incorporating ambipolar drifts

Turbulence with a large magnetic Reyonolds number, generically leads to rapidly growing magnetic noise over and above any mean field. We revisit the dynamics of this fluctuating field, in homogeneous, isotropic, helical turbulence. Assuming the turbulence to be Markovian, we first rederive, in a fairly transparent manner, the equation for the mean field, and corrected Fokker-Plank type equations for the magnetic correlations. In these equations, we also incorporate the effects of ambipolar drift which would obtain if the turbulent medium has a significant neutral component. We apply these equations to discuss a number of astrophysically interesting problems: (a) the small scale dynamo in galactic turbulence with a model Kolmogorov spectrum, incorporating the effect of ambipolar drift; (b) current helicity dynamics and the quasilinear corrections to the alpha effect; (c) growth of the current helicity and large-scale magnetic fields due to nonlinear effects.

K.Subramanian · 1997