Typical field lines of Beltrami flows and boundary field line behaviour of Beltrami flows on simply connected, compact, smooth manifolds with boundary

We characterise the boundary field line behaviour of Beltrami flows on compact, connected manifolds with vanishing first de Rham cohomology group. Namely we show that except for an at most nowhere dense subset of the boundary, on which the Beltrami field may vanish, all other field lines at the boundary are smoothly embedded 1-manifolds diffeomorphic to $${\mathbb {R}}$$ R , which approach the zero set as time goes to $$\pm \, \infty$$ ± ∞ . We then drop the assumptions of compactness and vanishing de Rham cohomology and prove that for almost every point on the given manifold, the field line passing through the point is either a non-constant, periodic orbit or a non-periodic orbit which comes arbitrarily close to the starting point as time goes to $$\pm \infty$$ ± ∞ . During the course of the proof, we in particular show that the set of points at which a Beltrami field vanishes in the interior of the manifold is countably 1-rectifiable in the sense of Federer and hence in particular has a Hausdorff dimension of at most 1. As a consequence, we conclude that for every eigenfield of the curl operator, corresponding to a non-zero eigenvalue, there always exists exactly one nodal domain.