Confinement of the Sun's interior magnetic field: some exact boundary-layer solutions

TL;DR

This paper presents exact boundary-layer solutions demonstrating that the Sun's interior magnetic field can be confined by weak downwelling flows, challenging recent claims and providing insights into solar magnetic dynamics.

Contribution

It introduces a family of exact, laminar, axisymmetric solutions for magnetic confinement in the Sun's interior, highlighting the role of weak downwelling flows and their stability.

Findings

Confinement layer can be maintained by downwelling as weak as 2x10^-6cm/s

Solutions suggest an upper limit on internal magnetic field strength of hundreds of gauss

Flow remains stable for downwelling up to about 10^-5cm/s

Abstract

High-latitude laminar confinement of the Sun's interior magnetic field is shown to be possible, as originally proposed by Gough and McIntyre (1998) but contrary to a recent claim by Brun and Zahn (A&A 2006). Mean downwelling as weak as 2x10^-6cm/s -- gyroscopically pumped by turbulent stresses in the overlying convection zone and/or tachocline -- can hold the field in advective-diffusive balance within a confinement layer of thickness scale ~ 1.5Mm ~ 0.002 x (solar radius) while transmitting a retrograde torque to the Ferraro-constrained interior. The confinement layer sits at the base of the high-latitude tachocline, near the top of the radiative envelope and just above the `tachopause' marking the top of the helium settling layer. A family of exact, laminar, frictionless, axisymmetric confinement-layer solutions is obtained for uniform downwelling in the limit of strong rotation and stratification. A scale analysis shows that the flow is dynamically stable and the assumption of laminar flow realistic. The solution remains valid for downwelling values of the order of 10^-5cm/s but not much larger. This suggests that the confinement layer may be unable to accept a much larger mass throughput. Such a restriction would imply an upper limit on possible internal field strengths, perhaps of the order of hundreds of gauss, and would have implications also for ventilation and lithium burning. The solutions have interesting chirality properties not mentioned in the paper owing to space restrictions, but described at http://www.atmos-dynamics.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/papers/SQBO/solarfigure.html