The equations of extended magnetohydrodynamics

Abstract: Extended magnetohydrodynamics (XMHD) is a fluid plasma model generalizing ideal MHD by taking into account the impact of Hall drift effects and the influence of electron inertial effects. XMHD has a Hamiltonian structure which has received over the past ten years a great deal of attention among physicists, and which is embodied by a non canonical Poisson algebra on an infinite-dimensional phase space. XMHD can alternatively be formulated as a nonlinear evolution equation. Our aim here is to investigate the corresponding Cauchy problem. We consider both incompressible and compressible versions of XMHD with, in the latter case, some additional bulk (fluid) viscosity. In this context, we show that XMHD can be recast as a well-posed symmetric hyperbolic-parabolic system implying pseudo-differential operators of order zero acting as coefficients and source terms. Along these lines, we can solve locally in time the associated initial value problems, with moreover a minimal Sobolev regularity. We also explain the emergence and propagation of inertial waves.