English

Inertial waves near corotation in 3D hydrodynamical disks

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2010-11-02 v3

Abstract

This paper concerns the interaction between non-axisymmetric inertial waves and their corotation resonances in a hydrodynamical disk. Inertial waves are of interest because they can localise in resonant cavities circumscribed by Lindblad radii, and as a consequence exhibit discrete oscillation frequencies that may be observed. It is often hypothesised that these trapped eigenmodes are affiliated with the poorly understood QPO phenomenon. We demonstrate that a large class of non-axisymmetric 3D inertial waves cannot manifest as trapped normal modes. This class includes any inertial wave whose resonant cavity contains a corotation singularity. Instead, these `singular' modes constitute a continuous spectrum and, as an ensemble, are convected with the flow, giving rise to shearing waves. Lastly, we present a simple demonstration of how the corotation singularity stabilizes three-dimensional perturbations in a slender torus.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0907.0641,
  title  = {Inertial waves near corotation in 3D hydrodynamical disks},
  author = {Henrik Latter and Steven Balbus},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0907.0641},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

17 pages, 5 figures. MNRAS accepted. V2 - Section 5.2 moved to appendix and errors removed

R2 v1 2026-06-21T13:21:09.501Z