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Updated: May 14, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Nondissipative saturation of the magnetorotational instability in thin disks
Edward Liverts1, Yuri Shtemler, Michael Mond
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer-Sheva 84105, Israel. eliverts@bgu.ac.il
Abstract:
A new nondissipative mechanism is proposed for the saturation of the axisymmetric magnetorotational (MRI) instability in thin Keplerian disks that are subject to an axial magnetic field. That mechanism relies on the energy transfer from the MRI to stable magnetosonic waves. Such mode interaction is enabled due to the vertical stratification of the disk that results in the discretization of its MRI spectrum, as well as by applying the appropriate boundary conditions. A second order Duffing-like amplitude equation for the initially unstable MRI modes is derived. The solutions of that equation exhibit bursty nonlinear oscillations with a constant amplitude that signifies the saturation level of the MRI. Those results are verified by a direct numerical solution of the full nonlinear reduced set of thin disk magnetohydrodynamics equations.
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