Enhancement of Ambipolar Diffusion Rates through Field Fluctuations

Details Enhancement of Ambipolar Diffusion Rates through Field Fluctuations Enhancement of Ambipolar Diffusion Rates through Field Fluctuations

2002-01-09

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0201131v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal

Scientific paper

10.1086/339502

Previous treatments of ambipolar diffusion in star-forming molecular clouds do not consider the effects of fluctuations in the fluid fields about their mean values. This paper generalizes the ambipolar diffusion problem in molecular cloud layers to include such fluctuations. Because magnetic diffusion is a nonlinear process, fluctuations can lead to an enhancement of the ambipolar diffusion rate. In addition, the stochastic nature of the process makes the ambipolar diffusion time take on a distribution of different values. In this paper, we focus on the case of long wavelength fluctuations and find that the rate of ambipolar diffusion increases by a significant factor $\Lambda \sim 1 - 10$. The corresponding decrease in the magnetic diffusion time helps make ambipolar diffusion more consistent with observations.

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