Magnetohydrodynamic stability of stochastically driven accretion flows

TL;DR

This paper studies how stochastic noise influences the stability of magnetohydrodynamic flows in astrophysical accretion disks, revealing that noise can induce turbulence and instability even in Rayleigh-stable conditions.

Contribution

It is the first to analyze three-dimensional hydromagnetic perturbations in rotating shear flows with stochastic noise, highlighting the universality of correlation-driven instability.

Findings

Stochastically driven flows show large correlations and energy dissipation.

Correlations are independent of background angular velocity profiles.

Stochastic noise can induce turbulence in Rayleigh-stable flows.

Abstract

We investigate the evolution of magnetohydrodynamic/hydromagnetic perturbations in the presence of stochastic noise in rotating shear flows. The particular emphasis is the flows whose angular velocity decreases but specific angular momentum increases with increasing radial coordinate. Such flows, however, are Rayleigh stable, but must be turbulent in order to explain astrophysical observed data and, hence, reveal a mismatch between the linear theory and observations/experiments. The mismatch seems to have been resolved, atleast in certain regimes, in the presence of weak magnetic field revealing magnetorotational instability. The present work explores the effects of stochastic noise on such magnetohydrodynamic flows, in order to resolve the above mismatch generically for the hot flows. We essentially concentrate on a small section of such a flow which is nothing but a plane shear flow supplemented by the Coriolis effect, mimicking a small section of an astrophysical accretion disk around a compact object. It is found that such stochastically driven flows exhibit large temporal and spatial auto-correlations and cross-correlations of perturbation and hence large energy dissipations of perturbation, which generate instability. Interestingly, auto-correlations and cross-correlations appear independent of background angular velocity profiles, which are Rayleigh stable, indicating their universality. This work, to the best of our knowledge, is the first attempt to understand the evolution of three-dimensional hydromagnetic perturbations in rotating shear flows in the presence of stochastic noise.