The Biermann catastrophe of numerical MHD

Abstract

The Biermann Battery effect is frequently invoked in cosmic magnetogenesis and studied in High-Energy Density laboratory physics experiments. Unfortunately, direct implementation of the Biermann effect in MHD codes is known to produce unphysical magnetic fields at shocks whose value does not converge with resolution. We show that this convergence breakdown is due to naive discretization, which fails to account for the fact that discretized irrotational vector fields have spurious solenoidal components that grow without bound near a discontinuity. We show that careful consideration of the kinetics of ion viscous shocks leads to a formulation of the Biermann effect that gives rise to a convergent algorithm. We note a novel physical effect a resistive magnetic precursor in which Biermann-generated field in the shock "leaks" resistively upstream. The effect appears to be potentially observable in experiments at laser facilities.