On the Saturation of Astrophysical Dynamos: Numerical Experiments with the No-cosines flow

Abstract

In the context of astrophysical dynamos we illustrate that the no-cosines flow, with zero mean helicity, can drive fast dynamo action and study the dynamo's mode of operation during both the linear and non-linear saturation regime: It turns out that in addition to a high growth rate in the linear regime, the dynamo saturates at a level significantly higher than normal turbulent dynamos, namely at exact equipartition when the magnetic Prandtl number is on the order of unity. Visualization of the magnetic and velocity fields at saturation will help us to understand some of the aspects of the non-linear dynamo problem.

8 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the proceedings of "Space Climate 1" to be peer-reviewed to Solar Physics

References in corpus (4)

• Is nonhelical hydromagnetic turbulence peaked at small scales?
• On the Connection between Mean Field Dynamo Theory and Flux Tubes
• Numerical Simulations of Kinematic Dynamo Action
• Dynamo action in turbulent flows

Cited by in corpus (6)

• The role of the Yoshizawa effect in the Archontis dynamo
• Mean electromotive force proportional to mean flow in mhd turbulence
• Comparison of forcing functions in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence
• Dissipative structures in a nonlinear dynamo
• Nonlinear dynamos at infinite magnetic Prandtl number
• Determination of a flow generating a neutral magnetic mode