On the Linear Stability of Weakly-Ionized, Magnetized Planar Shear Flows

TL;DR

This paper studies how ambipolar diffusion and the Hall effect influence the stability of weakly-ionized, magnetized shear flows, revealing that these non-ideal MHD processes can turn linear growth into exponential instabilities, aiding understanding of accretion disc dynamics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the combined effects of shear, ambipolar diffusion, and Hall effect on flow stability, introducing a toy model that captures the instability mechanisms.

Findings

Non-ideal MHD effects induce exponential growth in perturbations.

Instabilities explain destabilization in weakly-ionized accretion discs.

A simple toy model accurately captures the instability behaviour.

Abstract

We investigate the effects of ambipolar diffusion and the Hall effect on the stability of weakly-ionized, magnetized planar shear flows. Employing a local approach similar to the shearing-sheet approximation, we solve for the evolution of linear perturbations in both streamwise-symmetric and non-streamwise-symmetric geometries using WKB techniques and/or numerical methods. We find that instability arises from the combination of shear and non-ideal magnetohydrodynamic processes, and is a result of the ability of these processes to influence the free energy path between the perturbations and the shear. They turn what would be simple linear-in-time growth due to current and vortex stretching from shear into exponentially-growing instabilities. Our results aid in understanding previous work on the behaviour of weakly-ionized accretion discs. In particular, the recent finding that the Hall effect and ambipolar diffusion destabilize both positive and negative angular velocity gradients acquires a natural explanation in the more general context of this paper. We construct a simple toy model for these instabilities based upon transformation operators (shears, rotations, and projections) that captures both their qualitative and, in certain cases, exact quantitative behaviour.