Local well-posedness for the Hall-MHD equations with fractional magnetic diffusion

Dongho Chae, Renhui Wan, Jiahong Wu

Published 2014-04-02, updated 2015-01-30Version 2

The Hall-magnetohydrodynamics (Hall-MHD) equations, rigorously derived from kinetic models, are useful in describing many physical phenomena in geophysics and astrophysics. This paper studies the local well-posedness of classical solutions to the Hall-MHD equations with the magnetic diffusion given by a fractional Laplacian operator, $(-\Delta)^\alpha$. Due to the presence of the Hall term in the Hall-MHD equations, standard energy estimates appear to indicate that we need $\alpha\ge 1$ in order to obtain the local well-posedness. This paper breaks the barrier and shows that the fractional Hall-MHD equations are locally well-posed for any $\alpha>\frac12$. The approach here fully exploits the smoothing effects of the dissipation and establishes the local bounds for the Sobolev norms through the Besov space techniques. The method presented here may be applicable to similar situations involving other partial differential equations.