Suppression of turbulent resistivity in turbulent Couette flow

Abstract

Turbulent transport in rapidly rotating shear flow very efficiently transports angular momentum, a critical feature of instabilities responsible both for the dynamics of accretion disks and the turbulent power dissipation in a centrifuge. Turbulent mixing can efficiently transport other quantities like heat and even magnetic flux by enhanced diffusion. This enhancement is particularly evident in homogeneous, isotropic turbulent flows of liquid metals. In the New Mexico dynamo experiment, the effective resistivity is measured using both differential rotation and pulsed magnetic field decay to demonstrate that at very high Reynolds number rotating shear flow can be described entirely by mean flow induction with very little contribution from correlated velocity fluctuations.