Nonhelical turbulence and the inverse transfer of energy: A parameter study

Understand

We explore the phenomenon of the recently discovered inverse transfer of energy from small to large scales in decaying magnetohydrodynamical turbulence by Brandenburg et al.

• (2015) even for nonhelical magnetic fields.
• For this investigation we mainly employ the Pencil-Code performing a parameter study, where we vary the Prandtl number, the kinematic viscosity and the initial spectrum.
• We find that in order to get a decay which exhibits this inverse transfer, large Reynolds numbers ($\mathcal{O}\sim 10^{3}$) are needed and low Prandtl numbers of the order unity $Pr = 1$ are preferred.