Intermittency in spherical Couette dynamos

Abstract

We investigate dynamo action in three-dimensional numerical simulations of turbulent spherical Couette flows. Close to the onset of dynamo action, the magnetic field exhibits an intermittent behavior, characterized by a series of short bursts of the magnetic energy separated by low-energy phases. We show that this behavior corresponds to the so-called on-off intermittency. This behavior is here reported for dynamo action with realistic boundary conditions. We investigate the role of magnetic boundary conditions in this phenomenon.

References in corpus (4)

• Generation of magnetic field by dynamo action in a turbulent flow of liquid sodium
• On the magnetic fields generated by experimental dynamos
• Bi-stability in turbulent, rotating spherical Couette flow
• Low frequency noise controls on-off intermittency of bifurcating systems