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Updated: May 24, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Shallow water analogue of the standing accretion shock instability: experimental demonstration and a two-dimensional
Thierry Foglizzo1, Frédéric Masset, Jérôme Guilet
1Laboratoire AIM Paris-Saclay, CEA/Irfu Université Paris-Diderot CNRS/INSU, F-91191 Gif sur Yvette, France.
Abstract:
Despite the sphericity of the collapsing stellar core, the birth conditions of neutron stars can be highly nonspherical due to a hydrodynamical instability of the shocked accretion flow. Here we report the first laboratory experiment of a shallow water analogue, based on the physics of hydraulic jumps. Both the experiment and its shallow water modeling demonstrate a robust linear instability and nonlinear properties of symmetry breaking, in a system which is one million times smaller and about one hundred times slower than its astrophysical analogue.
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