TY - JOUR
T1 - Resolution Dependence of Magnetorotational Turbulence in the Isothermal Stratified Shearing Box
AU - Ryan, Benjamin R.
AU - Gammie, Charles F.
AU - Fromang, Sebastien
AU - Kestener, Pierre
N1 - Funding Information:
B.R.R. was supported by an Illinois Distinguished Fellowship and by NSF grant AST-1333612. Work at Los Alamos National Laboratory was done under the auspices of the National Nuclear Security Administration of the US Department of Energy. C.F.G.'s work was also supported in part by a Romano Professorial Scholar appointment, a Simons Fellowship in Theoretical Physics, and a Visiting Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2017/5/1
Y1 - 2017/5/1
N2 - Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence driven by the magnetorotational instability can provide diffusive transport of angular momentum in astrophysical disks, and a widely studied computational model for this process is the ideal, stratified, isothermal shearing box. Here we report results of a convergence study of such boxes up to a resolution of N = 256 zones per scale height, performed on blue waters at NCSA with ramses-gpu. We find that the time and vertically integrated dimensionless shear stress α N-1/3, i.e., the shear stress is resolution dependent. We also find that the magnetic field correlation length decreases with resolution, λ ∼ N-1/2. This variation is strongest at the disk midplane. We show that our measurements of are consistent with earlier studies, and we discuss possible reasons for the lack of convergence.
AB - Magnetohydrodynamic turbulence driven by the magnetorotational instability can provide diffusive transport of angular momentum in astrophysical disks, and a widely studied computational model for this process is the ideal, stratified, isothermal shearing box. Here we report results of a convergence study of such boxes up to a resolution of N = 256 zones per scale height, performed on blue waters at NCSA with ramses-gpu. We find that the time and vertically integrated dimensionless shear stress α N-1/3, i.e., the shear stress is resolution dependent. We also find that the magnetic field correlation length decreases with resolution, λ ∼ N-1/2. This variation is strongest at the disk midplane. We show that our measurements of are consistent with earlier studies, and we discuss possible reasons for the lack of convergence.
KW - accretion, accretion disks
KW - magnetohydrodynamics (MHD)
KW - turbulence
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U2 - 10.3847/1538-4357/aa6a52
DO - 10.3847/1538-4357/aa6a52
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85019143454
SN - 0004-637X
VL - 840
JO - Astrophysical Journal
JF - Astrophysical Journal
IS - 1
M1 - 6
ER -