Global Simulations of Magnetorotational Instability in The Collapsed Core of A Massive Star

TL;DR

This paper presents the first global simulations demonstrating that magnetorotational instability in collapsing massive stars can amplify magnetic fields to magnetar strength, influencing core turbulence and magnetic structure.

Contribution

It provides the first global, axisymmetric MHD simulations of magnetorotational instability in core-collapse supernovae starting from a sub-magnetar seed magnetic field.

Findings

Magnetic fields are amplified to magnetar strength.

Core turbulence is significantly affected during saturation.

Large-scale magnetic components dominate in the proto-neutron star.

Abstract

We performed the first numerical simulations of magnetorotational instability from a sub-magnetar-class seed magnetic field in core collapse supernovae. As a result of axisymmetric ideal MHD simulations, we found that the magnetic field is greatly amplified to magnetar-class strength. In saturation phase, a substantial part of the core is dominated by turbulence, and the magnetic field possesses dominant large scale components, comparable to the size of the proto-neutron star. A pattern of coherent chanel flows, which generally appears during exponential growth phase in previous local simulations, is not observed in our global simulations. While the approximate convergence in the exponential growth rate is attained by increasing spatial resolution, that of the saturation magnetic field is not achieved due to still large numerical diffusion. Although the effect of magnetic field on the dynamics is found to be mild, a simulation with a high-enough resolution might result in a larger impact.