The Effect of Combined Magnetic Geometries on Thermally Driven Winds I: Interaction of Dipolar and Quadrupolar Fields

TL;DR

This study investigates how combined dipolar and quadrupolar magnetic fields influence stellar wind braking, revealing that the torque depends on the dominant magnetic component and can be modeled by a broken power law.

Contribution

It provides a quantitative analysis of mixed magnetic geometries on stellar wind torque using extensive MHD simulations, extending understanding beyond pure field configurations.

Findings

Torque follows a broken power law with magnetic field strength.

Dipole component dominates in Solar-like stars.

Results applicable to all main-sequence cool stars.

Abstract

Cool stars with outer convective envelopes are observed to have magnetic fields with a variety of geometries, which on large scales are dominated by a combination of the lowest order fields such as the dipole, quadrupole and octupole modes. Magnetised stellar wind outflows are primarily responsible for the loss of angular momentum from these objects during the main sequence. Previous works have shown the reduced effectiveness of the stellar wind braking mechanism with increasingly complex, but singular, magnetic field geometries. In this paper, we quantify the impact of mixed dipolar and quadrupolar fields on the spin-down torque using 50 MHD simulations with mixed field, along with 10 of each pure geometries. The simulated winds include a wide range of magnetic field strength and reside in the slow-rotator regime. We find that the stellar wind braking torque from our combined geometry cases are well described by a broken power law behaviour, where the torque scaling with field strength can be predicted by the dipole component alone or the quadrupolar scaling utilising the total field strength. The simulation results can be scaled and apply to all main-sequence cool stars. For Solar parameters, the lowest order component of the field (dipole in this paper) is the most significant in determining the angular momentum loss.