Jet rotation driven by MHD shocks in helical magnetic fields
  In this paper we present a detailed numerical investigation of the hypothesis
that a rotation of astrophysical jets can be caused by magnetohydrodynamic
shocks in a helical magnetic field. Shock compression of the helical magnetic
field results in a toroidal Lorentz force component which will accelerate the
jet material in toroidal direction. This process transforms magnetic angular
momentum (magnetic stress) carried along the jet into kinetic angular momentum
(rotation). The mechanism proposed here only works in a helical magnetic field
configuration. We demonstrate the feasibility of this mechanism by axisymmetric
MHD simulations in 1.5D and 2.5D using the PLUTO code. In our setup the jet is
injected into the ambient gas with zero kinetic angular momentum (no rotation).
Different dynamical parameters for jet propagation are applied such as the jet
internal Alfven Mach number and fast magnetosonic Mach number, the density
contrast of jet to ambient medium, or the external sonic Mach number of the
jet. The mechanism we suggest should work for a variety of jet applications,
e.g. protostellar or extragalactic jets, and internal jet shocks (jet knots) or
external shocks between the jet and ambient gas (entrainment). For typical
parameter values for protostellar jets, the numerically derived rotation
feature looks consistent with the observations, i.e. rotational velocities of
0.1-1 percent of the jet bulk velocity.
