Study of Magnetorotational Instability in a Rotating Liquid Metal Disk

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Scientific paper

Fast angular momentum transport in accretion disks has been an outstanding problem in astrophysics for more three decades. Classically estimated viscosity of neutral fluid is too small to account for the fast accretion rate accompanied by angular momentum transport. It has been recently recognized that effects by magnetic field play important roles in this process. More specifically, magnetorotational instability (MRI) has been identified as a powerful mechanism to transport angular momentum. Although much theoretical and computational work has been done on this instability, there are no experimental studies on this subject. A small-scale, liquid metal disk is proposed to study MRI in laboratory with rotating inner and outer walls. Historically, the Taylor-Couette flow in a similar setup has been studied theoretically and experimentally for a long time as a hydrodynamical problem. Modifications due to magnetic field were also studied by Chandrasekhar but only for the cases when hydrodynamical modes are unstable. Local and global linear stability analysis show that MRI can be triggered at modest rotation speeds. An important feature of MRI is that the disk is unstable only when a finite vertical field is present. When the field is too small or too large, the disk is stable. These predictions have been verified also by direct linear magnetohydrodynamic simulations. Detailed results of analysis and proposed experiments will be presented and relations with accretion disk physics will be discussed.

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