Simulating Relative Canonical Helicity Transport in Laboratory Plasma Jets

The conservation and selective decay of ideal invariants can drive fluids toward structured, self-organized states determined not by the detailed initial conditions but by the magnitude of the constraining invariant. In magnetically dominated systems, magnetic helicity constrains relaxation to force-free Taylor states. For more general plasmas, where flow kinetic energy and thermal pressure are significant, a generalized or canonical helicity is needed to capture the coupled dynamics of flows and magnetic fields. To apply these concepts to realistic laboratory or astrophysical settings, where boundaries are open or the system is externally driven, a relative form of helicity is required to ensure gauge invariance. By modifying the PERSEUS extended MHD code to compute gauge-invariant relative canonical helicity, we investigate the injection, transport, and dissipation of this property during the evolution of novel, astrophysically relevant, magnetically driven plasma jets on the 1-MA COBRA generator. Simulation results are directly compared with experimental observations, thereby offering new insight into helicity dynamics in regimes where direct measurement remains unfeasible.