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Focused Workshop on Moffat's Magnetic Relaxation Problem

07.03.2023. - 07.07.2023.
Erdős Center

Description

Woltjer proposed magnetic helicity conservation as an explanation of the observation that various astrophysical plasmas tend to evolve toward a force-free state. Woltjer suggested the variational problem of minimizing total energy under the constraint that magnetic helicity is xed, and he computed formally that the minimizers are, indeed, force-free. Woltjer's problem can be seen as a lower bound to the more geometric variational problem proposed independently by Arnold and Moffatt: minimizing the total energy among those vectorfields which arise from push-forward under a volume-preserving diffeomorphism. The purpose of this focussed workshop is to review the available recent literature and explore connections between the h-principle and magnetic relaxation. For instance: what minimal level of regularity of the vectorfield would suffice to obtain minimizers (inmizers) of the Arnold-Moffat problem? One particular example to look at is the question of what regularity is obtained in Zeldovich's neutron star?

Organizers

Laszlo Szekelyhidi (Max Planck Institute)

 

Invited Speakers

Participants

Yann Brenier
Daniel Faraco
Matteo Giardi
Lukas Hauger
Sauli Lindberg
Fran Mengual
Tobias Ried
Sandra Ried

 

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