The Magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor Instability in Three Dimensions

By James M. Stone, Thomas A. Gardiner. 2007

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instability in three dimensions, with focus on the nonlinear structure and evolution that results from different initial field configurations. We study strong fields in the sense that the critical wavelength λc, at which perturbations along the field are stable, is a large fraction of the size of the computational domain. We consider magnetic fields that are initially parallel to the interface, but have a variety of configurations, including uniform everywhere, uniform in the light fluid only, and fields that change direction at the interface. Strong magnetic fields do not suppress instability; in fact, by inhibiting secondary shear instabilities they reduce mixing between the heavy and light fluid and cause the rate of growth of bubbles and fingers to increase in comparison to hydrodynamics. Fields parallel to, but whose direction changes at, the interface produce long, isolated fingers separated by the critical wavelength λc, which may be relevant to the morphology of the optical filaments in the Crab nebula.

Subfields: Geophysics, Molecular Biology, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/788c5e6e231c5e166072d6ce087c427459ba63b6

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In Geophysics

1. A. Kulkarni
2. M. Romanova
3. J. McKinney
4. J. Hester
5. A. Tchekhovskoy
6. J. Hawley
7. Ramesh Narayan

In Molecular Biology

1. M. Romanova
2. A. Kulkarni
3. J. Hester
4. J. Hawley
5. James M. Stone
6. J. McKinney

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. A. Tchekhovskoy
2. Ramesh Narayan
3. J. McKinney
4. A. Kulkarni
5. J. Hawley
6. R. Stanford
7. Princeton
8. A. Sa̧dowski

Citations in the corpus

• Gaseous Galaxy Halos (2012, background): “A magnetic field may help to preserve the clouds (Konz et al., 2002; Santillan et al., 2004; Kwak et al., 2011), however most of the simulations done thus far are in two dimensions and some simulations indicate a strong magnetic field can aid in the disruption (Stone & Gardiner, 2007).”
• General relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of magnetically choked accretion flows around black holes (2012, background): “…Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities) (Wang 1984; Kaisig et al. 1992; Lovelace et al. 1994; Spruit et al. 1995; Lubow & Spruit 1995; Wang 1996; Stehle & Spruit 2001; Nakamura et al. 2002; Narayan et al. 2003; Li & Narayan 2004; Spruit & Uzdensky 2005; Stone & Gardiner 2007; Johansen & Levin 2008).”
• Athena: A New Code for Astrophysical MHD (2008, background): “…(Lemaster et al. 2007), decay of hydrodynamical turbulence in the shearing box (Shen et al. 2006), the magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instability (Stone & Gardiner 2007a, 2007b), shock interactions with magnetized clouds (Shin et al. 2008), and the decay of supersonic turbulence in magnetized…”
• Accretion to magnetized stars through the Rayleigh–Taylor instability: global 3D simulations (2008, methodology): “An azimuthal field is expected to suppress short wavelength perturbations, and this has been observed in earlier simulations (Wang & Robertson 1984, 1985; Rastätter & Schindler 1999b; Stone & Gardiner 2007a,b).”
• The Crab Nebula: An Astrophysical Chimera (2008, background): “Stone & Gardiner (2007) discuss the behavior of the instability in three dimensions and find that the magnetic field plays a key role in the development of the instability.”