The energy and helicity of knotted magnetic flux tubes

Abstract

Magnetic relaxation of a magnetic field embedded in a perfectly conducting incompressible fluid to minimum energy magnetostatic equilibrium states is considered. It is supposed that the magnetic field is confined to a single flux tube which may be knotted. A local non-orthogonal coordinate system, zero-framed with respect to the knot, is introduced, and the field is decomposed into toroidal and poloidal ingredients with respect to this system. The helicity of the field is then determined; this vanishes for a field that is either purely toroidal or purely poloidal. The magnetic energy functional is calculated under the simplifying assumptions that the tube is axially uniform and of circular cross-section. The case of a tube with helical axis is first considered, and new results concerning kink mode instability and associated bifurcations are obtained. The case of flux tubes in the form of torus knots is then considered and the ‘ground-state’ energy function ͞m ( h ) (where h is an internal twist parameter) is obtained; as expected, ͞m ( h ), which is a topological invariant of the knot, increases with increasing knot complexity. The function ͞m ( h ) provides an upper bound on the corresponding function m ( h ) that applies when the above constraints on tube structure are removed. The technique is applicable to any knot admitting a parametric representation, on condition that points of vanishing curvature are excluded.