Effect of flow shear on the onset of dynamos

Abstract

Understanding the origin and structure of mean magnetic fields in astrophysical conditions is a major challenge. Shear flows often coexist in such astrophysical conditions and the role of flow shear on dynamo mechanism is only beginning to be investigated. Here, we present a direct numerical simulation (DNS) study of the effect of flow shear on dynamo instability for a variety of base flows with controllable mirror symmetry (i.e, fluid helicity). Our observations suggest that for helical base flow, the effect of shear is to suppress the small scale dynamo (SSD) action, i.e, shear helps the large scale magnetic field to manifest itself by suppressing SSD action. For non-helical base flows, flow shear has the opposite effect of amplifying the small-scale dynamo action. The magnetic energy growth rate ($\gamma$) for non-helical base flows are found to follow an algebraic nature of the form, $\gamma =-aS+b{S}^{\frac{2}{3}}$ , where a, b > 0 are real constants and S is the shear flow strength and $\gamma$ is found to be independent of scale of flow shear. Studies with different shear profiles and shear scale lengths for non-helical base flows have been performed to test the universality of our finding.

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Cited by in corpus (1)

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