Publikationsrepositorium - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf

A theoretician of the first water, Axel Brandenburg has always been interested in experimental MHD as well. Anecdotal evidence has it that he is the only person who witnessed in operation the three successful dynamo experiments in Riga, Karlsruhe and Cadarache. Axel’s theoretical work, in turn, has inspired experimentalists more often than not. One case in point is his early work on nonlinear and highly supercritical dynamos which has motivated investigations into the common mechanism underlying the field reversals of the geodynamo and the VKS dynamo. These efforts lead to the complementary explanations of reversals in terms of spectral exceptional points of non-selfadjoint dynamo operators, or via saddle-node bifurcations. In this context, we shortly report the construction progress of the DRESDYN precession driven dynamo, the set-up of which was partly motivated by the signature of Milankovic cycles in the reversal statistics of the geodynamo.
The second part of the talk refers to Axel’s work on massively non-linear, “self-creating” dynamos, such as the MRI dynamo or the Tayler-Spruit dynamo. Here we summarize some previous experiments on the magnetorotational instability (MRI) and the Tayler instability (TI), and present some recent results on double-diffusive instabilities for rotating flows with positive shear. The talk will close with a highly speculative idea which connects the oscillatory behaviour of the TI-related alpha-effect to the persistent synchronization of the solar dynamo with the 11.07 years periodic alignments of the tidally dominant planets Venus, Earth and Jupiter.