MHD in a Cylindrical Shearing Box. II. Intermittent Bursts and Substructures in MRI Turbulence

By performing ideal magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations with weak vertical magnetic fields in unstratified cylindrical shearing boxes with modified boundary treatment, we investigate MHD turbulence excited by magnetorotational instability. The cylindrical simulation exhibits extremely large temporal variation in the magnetic activity compared with the simulation in a normal Cartesian shearing box, although the time-averaged field strengths are comparable in the cylindrical and Cartesian setups. Detailed analysis of the terms describing magnetic energy evolution with triangle diagrams surprisingly reveals that in the cylindrical simulation the compression of toroidal magnetic field is unexpectedly as important as the winding due to differential rotation in amplifying magnetic fields and triggering intermittent magnetic bursts, which are not seen in the Cartesian simulation. The importance of the compressible amplification is also true for a cylindrical simulation with tiny curvature; the evolution of magnetic fields in the nearly Cartesian shearing box simulation is fundamentally different from that in the exact Cartesian counterpart. The radial gradient of epicyclic frequency, kappa, which cannot be considered in the normal Cartesian shearing box model, is the cause of this fundamental difference. An additional consequence of the spatial variation of kappa is continuous and ubiquitous formation of narrow high-density (low-density) and weak-field (strong-field) localized structures; seeds of these ring gap structures are created by the compressible effect and subsequently amplified and maintained under the marginally unstable condition regarding viscous-type instability.

Automated summary

By using ideal magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) simulations, researchers investigated MHD turbulence excited by magnetorotational instability. The study found that the cylindrical simulation exhibited larger temporal variation in magnetic activity compared to the Cartesian simulation, despite having similar time-averaged field strengths. The compression of toroidal magnetic fields and the winding due to differential rotation were revealed to be equally important in amplifying magnetic fields and triggering intermittent magnetic bursts in the cylindrical simulation, which were not observed in the Cartesian simulation. The radial gradient of epicyclic frequency was identified as the cause of this fundamental difference. The simulation also showed the formation of narrow localized structures due to the spatial variation of the epicyclic frequency.