Subharmonic oscillations of a forced hydromagnetic cavity

Abstract

We study the propagation of nonlinear MHD waves in a highly magnetized plasma cavity. The cavity's moving boundaries generate Alfvén waves, which in turn drive and interact with slow magnetosonic waves. The interacting wave system is analyzed by a Galerkin and multiple-scale analyses leading to simple dynamical equations. When the frequency of the forcing provided by the moving boundaries and that of the fundamental Alfvén eigenmode are close, the cavity behaves like a Duffing oscillator. Application of the Melnikov function theory shows that the Alfvén wave's amplitude undergoes both flip and saddle-node bifurcations as the amplitude and the phase of the boundary forcing vary. Direct numerical integration confirms these results and provides an estimate of the amount of energy dissipated in the bifurcations.