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Updated: May 8, 2026

Magnetically Induced Rotating Rayleigh-Taylor Instability
Published on: March 3, 2017
Three-dimensional vortices generated by self-replication in stably stratified rotating shear flows
Philip S Marcus1, Suyang Pei, Chung-Hsiang Jiang
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Abstract:
A previously unknown instability creates space-filling lattices of 3D vortices in linearly stable, rotating, stratified shear flows. The instability starts from an easily excited critical layer. The layer intensifies by drawing energy from the background shear and rolls up into vortices that excite new critical layers and vortices. The vortices self-similarly replicate to create lattices of turbulent vortices. The vortices persist for all time. This self-replication occurs in stratified Couette flows and in the dead zones of protoplanetary disks where it can destabilize Keplerian flows.
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