 Magnetic helicity

The magnetic helicity integrates the dot product of a magnetic vector potential and its magnetic field. It measures linkage and twisting of magnetic flux. For a solenoidal vector field $\mathbf{B}$ tangent to the boundary, it is unchanged by the gauge transformation $\mathbf{A}\mapsto \mathbf{A}+\nabla \chi$, since the change is ${\int }_V\nabla \cdot (\chi \mathbf{B})dV={\int }_{\partial V}\chi \mathbf{B}\cdot d\mathbf{S}=0$. If its density satisfies ${\partial }_{t}h=\nabla \cdot (f\mathbf{B}-h\mathbf{u})$ with both vector fields tangent to the boundary of a fixed volume, the divergence theorem gives conservation of its integral. This is an instance of helicity conservation by tangent boundary conditions.

Magnetic helicity is a topological property of magnetic fields that characterizes their twist and linkage. In more concrete terms, it is a measure of the complexity of a magnetic field configuration, specifically how "twisted" or "linked" various field lines are with respect to each other.