Magnetic Fields in Chaos

DeltaV · Post by **DeltaV** » Fri Dec 25, 2009 6:56 am

http://focus.aps.org/story/v24/st24

"The conventional wisdom has been that this chaos is confined to plasmas, but recent theoretical work has shown that chaotic magnetic fields also arise from the currents through special wire configurations, such as an undulating wire bent into a loop [1]. Now Makoto Hosoda of Osaka City University in Japan and his colleagues have looked at even simpler wire arrangements, some of which are representative of the wiring inside ordinary electronic devices.

The main example consisted of two adjacent circular loops tilted at 90 degrees to each other. The researchers' computer program picked an arbitrary starting point near the loops and calculated the magnetic field using standard formulas for the sum of two single loops. It then moved incrementally in the field's direction and continuously calculated the magnetic field at each point. With this technique, the team traced out the path of a single magnetic field line and showed the line weaving in and out of the two loops without ever retracing its steps. To confirm that this was chaos, the team showed that a slight change in starting point leads to a wildly different line trajectory, the classic definition of chaos."

JoeOh · Post by **JoeOh** » Fri Dec 25, 2009 8:42 pm

Neat little discovery. If one were to have those 2 wire loops as superconductors (insulated with a dielectric material) then you could put massive voltages on them and have a hefty magnetic field for the ions and electrons to run around in.

DeltaV · Post by **DeltaV** » Fri Dec 25, 2009 11:20 pm

If a magrid has similar chaoticity of field lines, would it help or hurt wiffleball confinement? Since chaos tends to "smear" the fields, I'm guessing it might make it more difficult for electrons to get through the holes.

Skipjack · Post by **Skipjack** » Sat Dec 26, 2009 1:55 am

If a magrid has similar chaoticity of field lines, would it help or hurt wiffleball confinement? Since chaos tends to "smear" the fields, I'm guessing it might make it more difficult for electrons to get through the holes.

I was going to ask the very same question.

KitemanSA · Post by **KitemanSA** » Sat Dec 26, 2009 2:59 am

How is this different than any three body problem? Do the same analysis with two large masses and a small mass using gravitational fields and you get the same reaction, don't you?

DeltaV · Post by **DeltaV** » Sat Dec 26, 2009 5:27 am

There is some visual resemblance to a gravitational 3-body problem, but it's not the same thing.

The red mag field lines, however, do sort of look like test mass trajectories around curved mass distributions; I think this is what you're suggesting. There might be some interesting mathematical similarities there if you treat the black curves as being composed of dense stuff like neutronium.

KitemanSA · Post by **KitemanSA** » Sat Dec 26, 2009 4:06 pm

Just thinking out loud here, but you have two two dimensional primary bodies with a one dimensional tertiary body, all in 4 dimensional space-time and I have two two dimensional primary bodies with a one dimensional tertiary body, all in 4 dimensional space-time; the only difference being that your primary bodies have two space dimensions and mine have one space and one time. Different but the same? Its all the same to me!