Self-Organizing Knotted Magnetic Structures in Plasma.

We perform full-magnetohydrodynamics simulations on various initially helical configurations and show that they reconfigure into a state where the magnetic field lines span nested toroidal surfaces. This relaxed configuration is not a Taylor state, as is often assumed for relaxing plasma, but a state where the Lorentz force is balanced by the hydrostatic pressure, which is lowest on the central ring of the nested tori. Furthermore, the structure is characterized by a spatially slowly varying rotational transform, which leads to the formation of a few magnetic islands at rational surfaces.

Constructing a class of topological solitons in magnetohydrodynamics.

We present a class of topological plasma configurations characterized by their toroidal and poloidal winding numbers, nt and np, respectively. The special case of nt=1 and np=1 corresponds to the Kamchatnov-Hopf soliton, a magnetic field configuration everywhere tangent to the fibers of a Hopf fibration so that the field lines are circular, linked exactly once, and form the surfaces of nested tori. We show that for nt∈Z+ and np=1, these configurations represent stable, localized solutions to the magnetohydrodynamic equations for an ideal incompressible fluid with infinite conductivity.