Related papers: A viscous-convective instability in laminar Kepler…
This review article summarizes two decades of laboratory research aimed at understanding the dynamics of accretion disks, with particular emphasis on magnetohydrodynamic experiments involving liquid metals and plasmas. First, the…
We present a non-linear numerical model for a geometrically thin accretion disk with the addition of stochastic non-linear fluctuations in the viscous parameter. These numerical realizations attempt to study the stochastic effects on the…
Gravitational stability of a disc consisting of the gaseous and the stellar components are studied in the linear regime when the gaseous component is turbulent. A phenomenological approach is adopted to describe the turbulence, in which not…
The evolution of the interface separating a conduit of light, viscous fluid rising buoyantly through a heavy, more viscous, exterior fluid at small Reynolds numbers is governed by the interplay between nonlinearity and dispersion. Previous…
We attempt to address the old problem of plane shear flows: the origin of turbulence and hence transport of angular momentum in accretion flows as well as laboratory flows, such as plane Couette flow. We undertake the problem by introducing…
We use well-established observational evidence to draw conclusions about the fundamental nature of the viscosity in accretion discs. To do this, we first summarise the observational evidence for the value of the dimensionless accretion disc…
The linear stability of thin Keplerian discs of weakly ionized polytropic plasma embedded in a mixed (toroidal-poloidal) axisymmetric magnetic field is studied. The effects of the central body on the equilibrium state of the discs are…
We employ numerical simulations to understand the evolution of elastic standing waves in disordered frictional disk systems, where the dispersion relations of rotational sound modes are analyzed in detail. As in the case of frictional…
We study the nonlinear evolution of the magnetic Rayleigh-Taylor instability using three-dimensional MHD simulations. We consider the idealized case of two inviscid, perfectly conducting fluids of constant density separated by a contact…
This thesis investigates phenomena occurring in black-hole accretion discs which are likely to induce high-frequency quasi-periodic variability. Two classes of pseudo-relativistic theoretical models are studied. The first is based on the…
We present the results of numerical integrations yielding the structure of and meridional flow in axisymmetric thin viscous accretion disk models. The solutions are obtained by simplifying and approximating first the equations, using…
Modelling the flow in a thin accretion disc like a dynamical system, we analyse the nature of the critical points of the steady solutions of the flow. For the simple inviscid disc there are two critical points, with the outer one being a…
We report experimental observation of an instability in a Couette-Taylor flow of a polymer fluid in a thin gap between two coaxially rotating cylinders in a regime where their angular velocity decreases with the radius while the specific…
The evolution of thin axisymmetric viscous accretion disks is a classic problem in astrophysics. While models based on this simplified geometry provide only approximations to the true processes of instability-driven mass and angular…
In low-mass disks, turbulent torques are probably the most important way of redistributing angular momentum. Here we present the theory of turbulent accretion disks. We show the molecular viscosity is far too small to account for the…
The status of our current understanding of angular momentum transport in accretion disks is reviewed. The last decade has seen a dramatic increase both in the recognition of key physical processes and in our ability to carry through direct…
Purely hydrodynamic numerical experiments into the evolution of astrophysical discs typically include some sort of viscosity in order to cause accretion. In this paper, we demonstrate an alternative method of implementing viscous forces,…
The theory of waves and instabilities in a differentially rotating disc containing a poloidal magnetic field is developed within the framework of ideal magnetohydrodynamics. A continuous spectrum, for which the eigenfunctions are localized…
We review results on the dynamics of warped gaseous discs. We consider tidal perturbation of a Keplerian disc by a companion star orbiting in a plane inclined to the disc. The perturbation induces the precession of the disc, and thus of any…
Many accretion discs are thought to be warped. Recent hydrodynamical simulations show that (i) discs can break into distinct planes when the amplitude of an imposed warp is sufficiently high and the viscosity sufficiently low, and that (ii)…