Vortex line and magnetic line representations are introduced for a description of flows in ideal hydrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), respectively. For incompressible fluids, it is shown with the help of this transformation that the equations of motion for vorticity Omega and magnetic field follow from a variational principle. By means of this representation, it is possible to integrate the hydrodynamic type system with the Hamiltonian H=integral|Omega|dr and some other systems. It is also demonstrated that these representations allow one to remove from the noncanonical Poisson brackets, defined in the space of divergence-free vector fields, the degeneracy connected with the vorticity frozenness for the Euler equation and with magnetic field frozenness for ideal MHD. For MHD, a new Weber-type transformation is found. It is shown how this transformation can be obtained from the two-fluid model when electrons and ions can be considered as two independent fluids. The Weber-type transformation for ideal MHD gives the whole Lagrangian vector invariant. When this invariant is absent, this transformation coincides with the Clebsch representation analog introduced by V.E. Zakharov and E. A. Kuznetsov [Dokl. Ajad. Nauk 194, 1288 (1970) [Sov. Phys. Dokl. 15, 913 (1971)]].

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The appearance of sharp vorticity gradients in two-dimensional hydrodynamic turbulence and their influence on the turbulent spectra are considered. We have developed the analog of the vortex line representation as a transformation to the curvilinear system of coordinates moving together with the divorticity lines. Compressibility of this mapping can be considered as the main reason for the formation of the sharp vorticity gradients at high Reynolds numbers. For two-dimensional turbulence in the case of strong anisotropy the sharp vorticity gradients can generate spectra which fall off as k −3 at large k, resembling the Kraichnan spectrum for the enstrophy cascade. For turbulence with weak anisotropy the k dependence of the spectrum due to the sharp gradients coincides with the Saffman spectrum, E͑k͒ϳk −4 . We have compared the analytical predictions with direct numerical solutions of the two-dimensional Euler equation for decaying turbulence. We observe that the divorticity is reaching very high values and is distributed locally in space along piecewise straight lines, thus indicating strong anisotropy, and accordingly we find a spectrum close to the k −3 spectrum.

Incompressible 3D Euler equations develop high vorticity in very thin pancake-like regions from generic large-scale initial conditions. In this work we propose an exact solution of the Euler equations for the asymptotic pancake evolution. This solution combines a shear flow aligned with an asymmetric straining flow, and is characterized by a single asymmetry parameter and an arbitrary transversal vorticity profile. The analysis is based on detailed comparison with numerical simulations performed using a pseudo-spectral method in anisotropic grids of up to 972 × 2048 × 4096.

Weak turbulence of magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) waves in strongly magnetized plasma is studied when the plasma pressure is less than the magnetic field pressure. In this situation the main nonlinear mechanism is the resonance scattering of fast magneto-acoustic and Alfvenic waves on slow magneto-acoustic waves. As a result, the former waves serve as the high-frequency waves with respect to the latter ones so that the total number of HF waves -an adiabatic invariant -conserves additionally. In the weak turbulence regime this invariant is shown to generate the Kolmogorov type spectrum with a constant flux of HF waves towards large-scale region. In the short-wave region another Kolmogorov spectrum can be realized with a constant energy flux. The explicit angle dependences for both types of turbulent spectra are found for the propagation angles close to the direction of a mean magnetic field.