Magneto-rotational instability and turbulent angular momentum transport

A 2005 INCITE Project

This project, led by by Fausto Cattaneo, University of Chicago, was awarded 2 million processor-hours and will study the forces that help newly born stars and black holes increase in size. In space, gases and other matter often form swirling disks around attracting central objects such as newly formed stars. The presence of magnetic fields can cause the disks to become unstable and develop turbulence, thereby causing the disk material to fall onto the central object. This project will carry out large-scale simulations to test theories on how turbulence can develop in such disks.

In recent years, laboratory experiments have been developed to test many aspects of this magnetically caused instability, but on a much smaller scale. The INCITE researchers plan to collaborate with the experimentalists in the field and to develop simulations that can extend the lab experiments by several orders of magnitude.

"What we are hoping to achieve is a simulation that matches the experimental work being done at Princeton," Cattaneo said. "If you can do the research both computationally and experimentally, you are much better off than just using one approach. With these INCITE resources, we should be able to do a very good job on the simulations."

Visualizations of the project's simulations