Self-excitation in a helical liquid metal flow: The Riga dynamo experiments

Abstract

The homogeneous dynamo effect is at the root of magnetic field generation in cosmic bodies, including planets, stars and galaxies. While the underlying theory had increasingly flourished since the middle of the 20th century, hydromagnetic dynamos were not realized in laboratory until 1999. On 11 November 1999, this situation changed with the first observation of a kinematic dynamo in the Riga experiment. Since that time, a series of experimental campaigns has provided a wealth of data on the kinematic and the saturated regime. This paper is intended to give a comprehensive survey about these experiments, to summarize their main results and to compare them with numerical simulations.

20 pages, 16 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Experimental observation and characterization of the magnetorotational instability
• Experimental evidence for magnetorotational instability in a helical magnetic field
• Magnetohydrodynamic experiments on cosmic magnetic fields
• History and results of the Riga dynamo experiments
• Magnetic field dynamos and magnetically triggered flow instabilities

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• Laboratory experiments on dynamo action and magnetically triggered flow instabilities