The weakly nonlinear magnetorotational instability in a thin-gap Taylor-Couette flow [HEAP]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.01616


The magnetorotational instability (MRI) is a fundamental process of accretion disk physics, but its saturation mechanism remains poorly understood despite considerable theoretical and computational effort. We present a multiple scales analysis of the non-ideal MRI in the weakly nonlinear regime — that is, when the most unstable MRI mode has a growth rate asymptotically approaching zero from above. Here, we develop our theory in a thin-gap, Cartesian channel. Our results confirm the finding by Umurhan et al. (2007) that the perturbation amplitude follows a Ginzburg-Landau equation. We extend these results by performing a detailed force balance for the saturated azimuthal velocity and vertical magnetic field, demonstrating that even when diffusive effects are important, the bulk flow saturates via the combined processes of reducing the background shear and rearranging and strengthening the background vertical magnetic field. We directly simulate the Ginzburg-Landau amplitude evolution for our system and demonstrate the pattern formation our model predicts on long length and time scales.

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S. Clark and J. Oishi
Fri, 7 Oct 16
13/75

Comments: 12 pages, 7 figures, submitted to ApJ