Coexistence of Weak and Strong Wave Turbulence in Incompressible Hall Magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

We report a numerical investigation of three-dimensional, incompressible, Hall magnetohydrodynamic turbulence with a relatively strong mean magnetic field. Using helicity decomposition and cross-bicoherence analysis, we observe that the resonant three-wave coupling is substantial among ion-cyclotron and whistler waves. A detailed study of the degree of nonlinearity of these two populations shows that the ion-cyclotron component experiences a transition from weak to strong wave turbulence going from large to small scales, while the whistler fluctuations display a weak wave turbulence character for all scales. This nontrivial coexistence of the two regimes with two populations of waves gives rise to anomalous anisotropy and scaling properties. The weak and strong wave turbulence components can be distinguished rather efficiently using spatiotemporal Fourier transforms. The analysis shows that while resonant triad interactions survive the highly nonlinear bath of ion-cyclotron fluctuations at large scales for which the degree of nonlinearity is low for both populations of waves, whistler waves tend to be killed by the nonlinear cross-coupling at smaller scales where the ion-cyclotron component is in the strong wave turbulent regime. Such a situation may have far-reaching implications for the physics of magnetized turbulence in many astrophysical and space plasmas and probably beyond, where different waves coexist and compete to transfer energy nonlinearly, across scales.