Chaos in Turbulence Driven by the Magnetorotational Instability

Abstract

Chaotic flow is studied in a series of numerical magnetohydrodynamical simulations that use the shearing box formalism. This mimics important features of local accretion disk dynamics. The magnetorotational instability gives rise to flow turbulence, and quantitative chaos parameters, such as the largest Lyapunov exponent, can be measured. Linear growth rates appear in these exponents even when the flow is fully turbulent. The extreme sensitivity to initial conditions associated with chaotic flows has practical implications, the most important of which is that hundreds of orbital times are needed to extract a meaningful average for the stress. If the evolution time in a disk is less than this, the classical $\alpha$ formalism will break down.

arXiv comment6 pages, 8 figures. To be appear in MNRAS

References in corpus (2)

• On the Dynamical Foundations of Alpha Disks
• Local Hydrodynamic Stability of Accretion Disks

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