Related papers: Double-diffusive mixing in stellar interiors in th…
Much progress has recently been made in understanding and quantifying vertical mixing induced by double-diffusive instabilities such as fingering convection (usually called thermohaline convection) and oscillatory double-diffusive…
A region of a star that is stable to convection according to the Ledoux criterion may nevertheless undergo additional mixing if the mean molecular weight increases with radius. This process is called fingering (thermohaline) convection and…
Double-diffusive instabilities are often invoked to explain enhanced transport in stably-stratified fluids. The most-studied natural manifestation of this process, fingering convection, commonly occurs in the ocean's thermocline and…
Iron-rich layers are known to form in the stellar subsurface through a combination of gravitational settling and radiative levitation. Their presence, nature and detailed structure can affect the excitation process of various stellar…
Fingering convection (or thermohaline convection) is a weak yet important kind of mixing that occurs in stably-stratified stellar radiation zones in the presence of an inverse mean-molecular-weight gradient. Brown et al. (2013) recently…
Hydrodynamic waves propagate through stellar interiors, transporting energy and angular momentum. They can also advect fluid elements to produce mixing, but this effect has not been quantified from first principles. We derive the leading…
Stably-stratified layers may be present at the top of the electrically-conducting fluid layers of many planets either because the temperature gradient is locally subadiabatic or because a stable composition gradient is maintained by the…
During most stages of stellar evolution the nuclear burning of lighter to heavier elements results in a radial composition profile which is stabilizing against buoyant acceleration, with light material residing above heavier material.…
Double-diffusive convection refers to mixing where the effects of thermal and composition gradients compete to determine the stability of a fluid. In addition to the familiar fast convective instability, such fluids exhibit the slow, direct…
We outline a novel linear instability that may arise in the dead-zones of protostellar disks, and possibly the fluid interiors of planets and protoplanets. In essence it is an axisymmetric buoyancy instability, but one that would not be…
Double-diffusive convection has been well studied in geophysical contexts, but detailed investigations of the regimes characteristic of stellar or planetary interiors have only recently become feasible. Since most astrophysical fluids are…
In the Ocean, thermohaline intrusions and interleaving layers occur within the water mass fronts with horizontal temperature and salinity gradients, which provide an important horizontal mixing mechanism. Here we report a new type of…
Thermohaline convection is a standard chemical mixing process in stellar interiors, yet its mixing efficiency is not fully settled. Competing theories predict turbulent diffusion coefficients, $D_\mu$, that can differ by orders of…
Rotational mixing, the key process in stellar evolution, transports angular momentum and chemical elements in stellar radiative zones. In the past two decades, an emphasis has been placed on the turbulent transport induced by the vertical…
Stably stratified layers are thought to develop at the top of the liquid metallic cores of many terrestrial planets. We consider the case where the thermal gradient is stable but the compositional gradient is unstable, a situation…
When particles settle through a stable temperature or salinity gradient they can drive an instability known as sedimentary fingering convection. This phenomenon is thought to occur beneath sediment-rich river plumes in lakes and oceans, in…
Turbulent mixing in the radiative regions of stars is usually either ignored or crudely accounted for in most stellar evolution models. However, there is growing theoretical and observational evidence that such mixing is present and can…
Double-diffusive convection, often referred to as semi-convection in astrophysics, occurs in thermally and compositionally stratified systems which are stable according to the Ledoux-criterion but unstable according to the Schwarzchild…
In the presence of rotation-induced mixing, element diffusion still occurs in stellar radiative zones, although at a slower rate than in the case of a complete stability of the stellar gas. As a consequence, helium settling leads to…
Numerous spectroscopic observations provide compelling evidence for a non-canonical mixing process that modifies the surface abundances of Li, C and N of low-mass red giants when they reach the bump in the luminosity function. Eggleton et…