Related papers: Overturning instability in forced ageostrophic oce…
Induced by proteins within the cell membrane or by differential growth, heating, or swelling, spontaneous curvatures can drastically affect the morphology of thin bodies and induce mechanical instabilities. Yet, the interaction of…
Wave-particle instabilities driven by departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium have been conjectured to play a role in governing solar wind dynamics. We calculate the statistical variation of linear stability over a large subset of…
The steady response of the stratosphere to a sea surface temperature (SST) forcing is considered in two separate theoretical models. It is first shown that anomalies in SST impose a geopotential anomaly at the tropopause. Solutions to the…
A method is developed to estimate the properties of a global hydrodynamic instability in turbulent flows from measurement data of the limit-cycle oscillations. For this purpose, the flow dynamics are separated in deterministic contributions…
We have investigated how the degree of imbalance in solar wind turbulence is modified by large-scale velocity shears in the solar wind plasma. The balance between counterpropagating Alfv\'enic fluctuations, which interact nonlinearly to…
The zonostrophic instability that leads to the emergence of zonal jets in barotropic beta-plane turbulence was analyzed through a geometric decomposition of the eddy stress tensor. The stress tensor is visualized by an eddy variance ellipse…
We propose a simple method to identify unstable parameter regions in general inviscid unidirectional shear flow stability problems. The theory is applicable to a wide range of basic flows, including those that are non-monotonic. We…
We investigate the linear tearing instability in weakly collisional plasmas using a non-ideal gyrotropic-MHD framework, uncovering a previously unknown scaling relation for the instability growth rate in high-$\beta$ environments. Even…
Changes in the strength of the thermohaline overturning circulation are associated, by geostrophy, with changes in the east-west pressure difference across an ocean basin. The tropical-polar density contrast and the east-west pressure…
Zonal flows in rapidly-rotating celestial objects such as the Sun, gas or ice giants form in a variety of surface patterns and amplitudes. Whereas the differential rotation on the Sun, Jupiter and Saturn features a super-rotating equatorial…
Storm surge, the onshore rush of sea water caused by the high winds and low pressure associated with a hurricane, can compound the effects of inland flooding caused by rainfall, leading to loss of property and loss of life for residents of…
Hydrodynamic instability of a gravity-driven flow down an inclined plane is investigated in the presence of a floating elastic plate which rests on the top surface of the flow. Linear instability of the system with respect to infinitesimal…
Shear flows are ubiquitous in astrophysical objects including planetary and stellar interiors, where their dynamics can have significant impact on thermo-chemical processes. Investigating the complex dynamics of shear flows requires…
Using field theoretic renormalization, an MBE-type growth process with an obliquely incident influx of atoms is examined. The projection of the beam on the substrate plane selects a "parallel" direction, with rotational invariance…
Spontaneous material shape changes, such as swelling, growth or thermal expansion, can be used to trigger dramatic elastic instabilities in thin shells. These instabilities originate in geometric incompatibility between the preferred…
Linear theory is a well developed framework for characterizing instabilities in weakly collisional plasmas, such as the solar wind. In the previous instalment of this series, we analyzed ~1.5M proton and alpha particle Velocity Distribution…
We study both theoretically and experimentally switching dynamics in surface stabilized ferroelectric liquid crystal cells with asymmetric boundary conditions. In these cells the bounding surfaces are treated differently to produce…
The Vertical Shear Instability is an axisymmetric effect suggested to drive turbulence in the magnetically inactive zones of protoplanetary accretion disks. Here we examine its physical mechanism in analytically tractable ``minimal models"…
Several independent observations have suggested that catastrophe transition in microtubules is not a first-order process, as is usually assumed. Recent {\it in vitro} observations by Gardner et al.[ M. K. Gardner et al., Cell {\bf147}, 1092…
Turbulence anisotropy was recently integrated into Monin-Obukhov Similarity Theory (MOST), extending its applicability to complex terrain and diverse surface conditions. Implementing this generalized MOST in numerical models, however,…