Hydromagnetic turbulence in computer simulations

Abstract

In ordinary turbulence research it has been a long standing tradition to solve the equations in spectral space giving the best possible accuracy. This is indeed a natural choice for incompressible problems with periodic boundaries, but it is no longer optimal in many astrophysical circumstances. It is argued that lower order spatial derivatives schemes are unacceptable in view of their low overall accuracy, even when mass, momentum, and energy are conserved to machine accuracy. High order finite difference schemes are therefore found to be quite efficient and physically appropriate. They are also easily and efficiently implemented on massively parallel computers. High order schemes also yield sufficient overall accuracy. Our code uses centered finite differences which make the adaptation to other problems simple. Since the code is not written in conservative form, conservation of mass, energy and momentum can be used to monitor to quality of the solution. A third order Runge-Kutta scheme with 2N-storage is used for calculating the time advance.