Powerful lasers may be used in the future to produce magnetic fields that would allow us to study turbulent magnetohydrodynamic inverse cascade behaviour. This has so far only been seen in numerical simulations. In the laboratory, however, the produced fields may be highly anisotropic. Here, we present corresponding simulations to show that, during the turbulent decay, such a magnetic field undergoes spontaneous isotropisation. As a consequence, we find the decay dynamics to be similar to that in isotropic turbulence. We also find that an initially pointwise non-helical magnetic field is unstable and develops magnetic helicity fluctuations that can be quantified by the Hosking integral. It is a conserved quantity that characterises magnetic helicity fluctuations and governs the turbulent decay when the mean magnetic helicity vanishes. As in earlier work, the ratio of the magnetic decay time to the Alfvén time is found to be approximately 50 in the helical and non-helical cases. At intermediate times, the ratio can even reach a hundred. This ratio determines the endpoints of cosmological magnetic field evolution.
Brandenburg et al. (Fri,) studied this question.