Recent years have witnessed dramatic progress in our understanding of how turbulence arises and transports angular momentum in astrophysical accretion disks. The key conceptual point has its origins in work dating from the 1950s, but its implications have been fully understood only in the last several years: the combination of a subthermal magnetic field (any nonpathological configuration will do) and outwardly decreasing differential rotation rapidly generates magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence via a remarkably simple linear instability. The result is a greatly enhanced effective viscosity, the origin of which had been a long-standing problem. The MHD nature of disk turbulence has linked two broad domains of magnetized fluid research: accretion theory and dynamos. The understanding that weak magnetic fields are not merely passively acted upon by turbulence, but actively generate it, means that the assumptions of classical dynamo theory break down in disks. Paralleling the new conceptual understanding has been the development of powerful numerical MHD codes. These have taught us that disks truly are turbulent, transporting angular momentum at greatly enhanced rates. We have also learned, however, that not all forms of disk turbulence do this. Purely hydrodynamic turbulence, when it is imposed, simply causes fluctuations without a significant increase in transport. The interplay between numerical simulation and analytic arguments has been particularly fruitful in accretion disk theory and is a major focus of this article. The authors conclude with a summary of what is now known of disk turbulence and mention some knotty outstanding questions (e.g., what is the physics behind nonlinear field saturation?) for which we may soon begin to develop answers. [S0034-6861(98)00501-7] CONTENTS 42 5. The evolution of an initially random field 42 6. Shear vs vorticity 43 7. Density stratification 44 C. MHD simulations: a summary 45 VI. Accretion Disk Dynamos 45 A. The dynamo-electric machine 45 B. A brief review of mean-field dynamo theory 46 C. Mean-field theory and nonlinear evolution of the magnetorotational instability 47 D. Saturation 49 VII. Summary 50 Acknowledgments 50 References 51
The effects of Hall electromotive forces (HEMFs) on the linear stability of
protostellar disks are examined. Earlier work on this topic focused on axial
field and perturbation wavenumbers. Here we treat the problem more generally.
Both axisymmetric and nonaxisymmetric cases are investigated. Though seldom
explicitly included in calculations, HEMFs appear to be important whenever
Ohmic dissipation is. They allow for the appearance of electron whistler waves,
and since these have right-handed polarization, a helicity factor is also
introduced into the stability problem. This factor is the product of the
components of the angular velocity and magnetic field along the perturbation
wavenumber, and it is destabilizing when negative. Unless the field and angular
velocity are exactly aligned, it is always possible to find destabilizing
wavenumbers. HEMFs can destabilize any differential rotation law, even those
with angular velocity increasing outward. Regardless of the sign of the angular
velocity gradient, the maximum growth rate is always given in magnitude by the
local Oort A value of the disk, as in the standard magnetorotational
instability. The role of Hall EMFs may prove crucial to understanding how
turbulence is maintained in the ``low state'' of eruptive disk systems.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, AAS LaTEx, v.4.0. Submitted to Ap
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