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A. Brandenburg

Publications and source records attributed to A. Brandenburg.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

Magnetic diffusivity tensor and dynamo effects in rotating and shearing turbulence

The turbulent magnetic diffusivity tensor is determined in the presence of rotation or shear. The question is addressed whether dynamo action from the shear-current effect can explain large-scale magnetic field generation found in simulations with shear. For this purpose a set of evolution equations for the response to imposed test fields is solved with turbulent and mean motions calculated from the momentum and continuity equations. The corresponding results for the electromotive force are used to calculate turbulent transport coefficients. The diagonal components of the turbulent magnetic diffusivity tensor are found to be very close together, but their values increase slightly with increasing shear and decrease with increasing rotation rate. In the presence of shear, the sign of the two off-diagonal components of the turbulent magnetic diffusion tensor is the same and opposite to the sign of the shear. This implies that dynamo action from the shear--current effect is impossible, except perhaps for high magnetic Reynolds numbers. However, even though there is no alpha effect on the average, the components of the alpha tensor display Gaussian fluctuations around zero. These fluctuations are strong enough to drive an incoherent alpha--shear dynamo. The incoherent shear--current effect, on the other hand, is found to be subdominant.

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Boundary layer on the surface of a neutron star

In an attempt to model the accretion onto a neutron star in low-mass X-ray binaries, we present two-dimensional hydrodynamical models of the gas flow in close vicinity of the stellar surface. First we consider a gas pressure dominated case, assuming that the star is non-rotating. For the stellar mass we take $M_{\rm star}=1.4 \times 10^{-2} \msun$ and for the gas temperature $T=5 \times 10^6$ K. Our results are qualitatively different in the case of a realistic neutron star mass and a realistic gas temperature of $T\simeq 10^8$ K, when the radiation pressure dominates. We show that to get the stationary solution in a latter case, the star most probably has to rotate with the considerable velocity.

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Modeling a Maunder Minimum

We introduce on/off intermittency into a mean field dynamo model by imposing stochastic fluctuations in either the alpha effect or through the inclusion of a fluctuating electromotive force. Sufficiently strong small scale fluctuations with time scales of the order of 0.3-3 years can produce long term variations in the system on time scales of the order of hundreds of years. However, global suppression of magnetic activity in both hemispheres at once was not observed. The variation of the magnetic field does not resemble that of the sunspot number, but is more reminiscent of the 10 Be record. The interpretation of our results focuses attention on the connection between the level of magnetic activity and the sunspot number, an issue that must be elucidated if long term solar effects are to be well understood.

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Scale dependence of alpha effect and turbulent diffusivity

Aims: To determine alpha effect and turbulent magnetic diffusivity for mean magnetic fields with profiles of different length scale from simulations of isotropic turbulence, and to relate these results to nonlocal formulations in which alpha and the turbulent magnetic diffusivity correspond to integral kernels. Methods: A set of evolution equations for magnetic fields is solved which gives the response to imposed test fields, that is, mean magnetic fields with various wavenumbers. Both an imposed fully helical steady flow consisting of a pattern of screw-like motions (Roberts flow) and time-dependent statistically steady isotropic turbulence are considered. In the latter case the aforementioned evolution equations are solved simultaneously with the momentum and continuity equations. The corresponding results for the electromotive force are used to calculate alpha and magnetic diffusivity tensors. Results: For both the Roberts flow under the second--order correlation approximation and isotropic turbulence alpha and turbulent magnetic diffusivity are largest at large scales and these values diminish toward smaller scales. In both cases the alpha effect and turbulent diffusion kernels are well approximated by exponentials, corresponding to Lorentzian profiles in Fourier space. For isotropic turbulence the turbulent diffusion kernel is half as wide as the alpha effect kernel. For the Roberts flow beyond the second--order correlation approximation the turbulent diffusion kernel becomes negative at large scales.

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The helicity constraint in spherical shell dynamos

The motivation for considering distributed large scale dynamos in the solar context is reviewed in connection with the magnetic helicity constraint. Preliminary accounts of 3-dimensional direct numerical simulations (in spherical shell segments) and simulations of 2-dimensional mean field models (in spherical shells) are presented. Interesting similarities as well as some differences are noted.

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Turbulent viscosity and Lambda-effect from numerical turbulence models

Homogeneous anisotropic turbulence simulations are used to determine off-diagonal components of the Reynolds stress tensor and its parameterization in terms of turbulent viscosity and Lambda-effect. The turbulence is forced in an anisotropic fashion by enhancing the strength of the forcing in the vertical direction. The Coriolis force is included with a rotation axis inclined relative to the vertical direction. The system studied here is significantly simpler than that of turbulent stratified convection which has often been used to study Reynolds stresses. Certain puzzling features of the results for convection, such as sign changes or highly concentrated latitude distributions, are not present in the simpler system considered here.

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Thermal Production of Gravitinos

We evaluate the gravitino production rate in supersymmetric QCD at high temperature to leading order in the gauge coupling. The result, which is obtained by using the resummed gluon propagator, depends logarithmically on the gluon plasma mass. As a byproduct, a new result for the axion production rate in a QED plasma is obtained. The implicatons for the cosmological dark matter problem are briefly discussed, in particular the intriguing possibility that gravitinos are the dominant part of cold dark matter.

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Simulations of the anisotropic kinetic and magnetic alpha effects

The validity of a closure called the minimal tau approximation (MTA), is tested in the context of dynamo theory, wherein triple correlations are assumed to provide relaxation of the turbulent electromotive force. Under MTA, the alpha effect in mean field dynamo theory becomes proportional to a relaxation time scale multiplied by the difference between kinetic and current helicities. It is shown that the value of the relaxation time is positive and, in units of the turnover time at the forcing wavenumber, it is of the order of unity. It is quenched by the magnetic field -- roughly independently of the magnetic Reynolds number. However, this independence becomes uncertain at large magnetic Reynolds number. Kinetic and current helicities are shown to be dominated by large scale properties of the flow.

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Dynamos in accretion discs

It is argued that accretion discs in young stellar objects may have hot coronae that are heated by magnetic reconnection. This is a consequence of the magneto-rotational instability driving turbulence in the disc. Magnetic reconnection away from the midplane leads to heating of the corona which, in turn, contributes to driving disc winds.

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CP Studies and Non-Standard Higgs Physics

There are many possibilities for new physics beyond the Standard Model that feature non-standard Higgs sectors. These may introduce new sources of CP violation, and there may be mixing between multiple Higgs bosons or other new scalar bosons. Alternatively, the Higgs may be a composite state, or there may even be no Higgs at all. These non-standard Higgs scenarios have important implications for collider physics as well as for cosmology, and understanding their phenomenology is essential for a full comprehension of electroweak symmetry breaking. This report discusses the most relevant theories which go beyond the Standard Model and its minimal, CP-conserving supersymmetric extension: two-Higgs-doublet models and minimal supersymmetric models with CP violation, supersymmetric models with an extra singlet, models with extra gauge groups or Higgs triplets, Little Higgs models, models in extra dimensions, and models with technicolour or other new strong dynamics. For each of these scenarios, this report presents an introduction to the phenomenology, followed by contributions on more detailed theoretical aspects and studies of possible experimental signatures at the LHC and other colliders.

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Instantons in Lepton Pair Production

We consider QCD instanton-induced contributions to lepton pair production in hadron-hadron collisions. We relate these contributions to those known from deep inelastic scattering and demonstrate that they can be calculated reliably for sufficiently large momentum transfer. We observe that the instanton contribution to the angular distribution of the lepton pairs at finite momentum transfer strongly violates the Lam-Tung relation - a relation between coefficient functions of the angular distribution which is valid within the framework of ordinary perturbation theory. The drastic violation of this relation, as seen in experimental data, might be related to such instanton-induced effects.

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Hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic energy spectra from large eddy simulations

Direct and large eddy simulations of hydrodynamic and hydromagnetic turbulence have been performed in an attempt to isolate artifacts from real and possibly asymptotic features in the energy spectra. It is shown that in a hydrodynamic turbulence simulation with a Smagorinsky subgrid scale model using 512^3 meshpoints two important features of the 4096^3 simulation on the Earth simulator (Kaneda et al. 2003, Phys. Fluids 15, L21) are reproduced: a k^{-0.1} correction to the inertial range with a k^{-5/3} Kolmogorov slope and the form of the bottleneck just before the dissipative subrange. Furthermore, it is shown that, while a Smagorinsky-type model for the induction equation causes an artificial and unacceptable reduction in the dynamo efficiency, hyper-resistivity yields good agreement with direct simulations. In the large-scale part of the inertial range, an excess of the spectral magnetic energy over the spectral kinetic energy is confirmed. However, a trend towards spectral equipartition at smaller scales in the inertial range can be identified. With magnetic fields, no explicit bottleneck effect is seen.

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The nature of turbulence in OMC1 at the star forming scale: observations and simulations

Aim: To study turbulence in the Orion Molecular Cloud (OMC1) by comparing observed and simulated characteristics of the gas motions. Method: Using a dataset of vibrationally excited H2 emission in OMC1 containing radial velocity and brightness which covers scales from 70AU to 30000AU, we present the transversal structure functions and the scaling of the structure functions with their order. These are compared with the predictions of two-dimensional projections of simulations of supersonic hydrodynamic turbulence. Results: The structure functions of OMC1 are not well represented by power laws, but show clear deviations below 2000AU. However, using the technique of extended self-similarity, power laws are recovered at scales down to 160AU. The scaling of the higher order structure functions with order deviates from the standard scaling for supersonic turbulence. This is explained as a selection effect of preferentially observing the shocked part of the gas and the scaling can be reproduced using line-of-sight integrated velocity data from subsets of supersonic turbulence simulations. These subsets select regions of strong flow convergence and high density associated with shock structure. Deviations of the structure functions in OMC1 from power laws cannot however be reproduced in simulations and remains an outstanding issue.

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Magnetic field generation in fully convective rotating spheres

Magnetohydrodynamic simulations of fully convective, rotating spheres with volume heating near the center and cooling at the surface are presented. The dynamo-generated magnetic field saturates at equipartition field strength near the surface. In the interior, the field is dominated by small-scale structures, but outside the sphere by the global scale. Azimuthal averages of the field reveal a large-scale field of smaller amplitude also inside the star. The internal angular velocity shows some tendency to be constant along cylinders and is ``anti-solar'' (fastest at the poles and slowest at the equator).

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Connection between active longitudes and magnetic helicity

A two-dimensional mean field dynamo model is solved where magnetic helicity conservation is fully included. The model has a negative radial velocity gradient giving rise to equatorward migration of magnetic activity patterns. In addition the model develops longitudinal variability with activity patches travelling in longitude. These patches may be associated with active longitudes.

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The angular momentum transport by the strato-rotational instability in simulated Taylor-Couette flows

Aims: To investigate the stability and angular momentum transport by the strato-rotational instability in the nonlinear regime. Methods: The hydrodynamic compressible equations are solved in a cartesian box in which the outer cylinder is embedded. Gravity along the rotation axis leads to density stratification. No-slip boundary conditions are used in the radial direction, while free-slip conditions are used on the two ends of the cylinders. Results: The strato-rotational instability is confirmed and the Reynolds stress is shown to transport angular momentum away from the axis. However, the growth rate decreases with increasing Reynolds number. This, as well as the presence of boundaries renders this instability less relevant for astrophysical applications.

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Radiative transfer in decomposed domains

An efficient algorithm for calculating radiative transfer on massively parallel computers using domain decomposition is presented. The integral formulation of the transfer equation is used to divide the problem into a local but compute-intensive part for calculating the intensity and optical depth integrals, and a nonlocal part for communicating the intensity between adjacent processors. The waiting time of idle processors during the nonlocal communication part does not have a severe impact on the scaling. The wall clock time thus scales nearly linearly with the inverse number of processors.

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