Ideal Magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract

The simplest model to describe the dynamics of plasmas immersed in a magnetic field is the one-fluid magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), which treats the plasma composed of many charged particles with locally neutral charge as a continuous single fluid [10.1]. This theory does not provide information on the velocity distribution and neglects the physics relating to wave-particle interactions, as does the two-fluid theory as well. It does have the advantage that the macroscopic dynamics of the magnetized plasma can be analyzed in realistic three-dimensional geometries. From this point of view the one-fluid MHD is often more useful than the two-fluid theory.