Lydia Korre

At the base of the Sun’s convective zone, a narrow shear layer called the tachocline separates strong latitudinal differential rotation above from nearly rigid rotation in the radiative zone below. The observed thinness of the tachocline is a long-standing dynamical puzzle because the tachocline should have spread significantly due to inward-burrowing meridional circulation, also called “radiative spreading.” We recently presented the first pair of global simulations to reveal a statistically stationary tachocline confined against radiative spreading by the Maxwell stresses from the large-scale nonaxisymmetric modes of a dynamo, which penetrated into and below the tachocline through a novel magnetic skin effect. In the work presented here, we systematically examine how this “dynamo confinement scenario” works against radiative spreading in a suite of simulations as the governing parameters trend in the direction of the true solar regime. We find that as the stable stratification of the radiative zone is made progressively stronger, the dynamo cycles get longer, the magnetic field consequently penetrates deeper due to the skin effect, and the tachocline becomes more confined. Furthermore, these results have interesting consequences for solar spin-down. In all of our radiatively spreading simulations, the tachocline region spins down due to the burrowing circulation. Below the tachocline, the Maxwell stresses transmit this spin-down further to rigidify the deeper radiative zone. We thus speculate that, in addition to confining the tachocline, the dynamo may provide a pathway to communicate spin-down from the near-surface layers to the deep interior.

The helioseismically observed solar tachocline is a thin internal boundary layer of shear that separates the rigidly rotating solar radiative zone from the differentially rotating convective zone and is believed to play a central role in the 22-yr solar dynamo cycle. The observed thinness of the tachocline has long been a mystery, given the expected tendency of such shear to undergo radiative spreading. Radiative spreading is the process by which the meridional circulation and angular velocity burrow into a stably stratified fluid owing to the mitigating effect of radiative thermal diffusion. A confinement mechanism is thus required to keep the tachocline so thin. In previous work using global dynamo simulations, we achieved a statistically stationary confined tachocline for which the confinement mechanism was derived from the Maxwell stresses arising from a dynamo-generated nonaxisymmetric poloidal magnetic field. However, the parameters chosen meant that the tachocline was confined against viscous spreading instead of radiative spreading. Here, we show that this previously identified dynamo confinement scenario still succeeds in a simulation that lies in the more solar-like radiative spreading regime. In particular, a nonaxisymmetric, quasi-cyclic dynamo develops in the convective zone and overshoot layer, penetrates into the radiative zone via a novel type of skin effect, and creates Maxwell stresses that confine the tachocline over many magnetic cycles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully self-consistent rendering of a confined tachocline in a global numerical simulation in the parameter regime appropriate to the Sun.

The helioseismically observed solar tachocline is a thin internal boundary layer of shear that separates the rigidly-rotating solar radiative zone from the differentially-rotating convective zone and is believed to play a central role in the 22-year solar dynamo cycle. The observed thinness of the tachocline has long been a mystery, given the expected tendency of such shear to undergo radiative spreading. Radiative spreading is the process by which the meridional circulation and angular velocity burrow into a stably-stratified fluid owing to the mitigating effect of radiative thermal diffusion. A confinement mechanism is thus required to keep the tachocline so thin. In previous work using global dynamo simulations, we achieved a statistically-stationary confined tachocline where the confinement mechanism was derived from the Maxwell stress arising from a dynamo-generated nonaxisymmetric poloidal magnetic field. However, the parameters chosen meant that the tachocline was confined against viscous spread instead of radiative spread. Here, we show that the previously identified dynamo confinement mechanism still succeeds in a simulation that lies in the more solar-like radiative spreading regime. In particular, a nonaxisymmetric, quasicyclic dynamo develops in the convective zone and overshoot layer, penetrates into the radiative zone via a novel type of skin effect, and creates a Maxwell stress that confines the tachocline over many magnetic cycles. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully self-consistent rendering of a confined tachocline in a global numerical simulation in the parameter regime appropriate to the Sun.

The propagation of meridional circulation below the base of the convection zone (CZ) of low-mass stars may play a crucial role in the transport of angular momentum and also significantly contribute to the transport of chemical species and magnetic fields within their stable radiative zone (RZ). We systematically study these large-scale mean flows by performing three-dimensional global numerical simulations in a spherical shell that consists of a convective region overlying a stably stratified region. We find that the meridional flows can penetrate distances as large as ∼0.21r _o (where r _o is the outer radius) below the base of the CZ, provided that the Eddington–Sweet timescale t _ES is much shorter than the viscous timescale t _ν , as measured by the parameter σ = ( t ES / t ν ) 1 / 2 . In the solar-like regime, where σ ≲ 1 in the upper RZ, we find that the angular momentum transport in the deep RZ is determined primarily by the action of the Coriolis force on meridional flows. In contrast, in models run in the σ > 1 regime, the meridional flows become weaker and the viscous effects dominate. We find that the penetration lengthscale δ _MC of these mean flows when σ ≲ 1 is proportional to σ ^−0.22. Our findings may provide a better understanding of the role of the meridional flows in the dynamics of the solar interior and inform future numerical studies that are focused on capturing solar-like dynamics self-consistently.

Meridional circulation regulates the Sun’s interior dynamics and magnetism. While it is well accepted that meridional flows are poleward at the Sun’s surface, helioseismic observations have yet to provide a definitive answer for the depth at which those flows return to the equator, or the number of circulation cells in depth. Here, we explore the observability of multiple circulation cells stacked in radius. Specifically, we examine the seismic signature of several meridional flow profiles by convolving time–distance averaging kernels with mean flows obtained from a suite of 3D hydrodynamic simulations. At mid and high latitudes, we find that weak flow structures in the deep convection zone can be obscured by signals from the much stronger surface flows. This contamination of 1–2 m s⁻¹ is caused by extended side lobes in the averaging kernels, which produce a spurious equatorward signal with flow speeds that are 1 order of magnitude stronger than the original flow speeds in the simulations. At low latitudes, the flows in the deep layers of the simulations are stronger (>2 m s⁻¹) and multiple cells across the convection zone can produce a sufficiently strong signal to survive the convolution process. Now that meridional flows can be measured over two decades of data, the uncertainties arising from convective noise have fallen to a level where they are comparable in magnitude to the systematic biases caused by nonlocal features in the averaging kernels. Hence, these systematic errors are beginning to influence current helioseismic deductions and need broader consideration.

Whitepaper #105 in the Decadal Survey for Solar and Space Physics (Heliophysics) 2024-2033. Main topics: basic research; infrastructure/workforce/other programmatic. Additional topics: solar physics; research tools and infrastructure.

Convective motions extend beyond the nominal boundaries of a convection zone. These motions mix fluid through multiple mechanisms collectively called “convective boundary mixing.” In this note, we discuss three distinct fluid dynamical processes: convective overshoot, entrainment, and penetrative convection. We describe the structure of a convective boundary that these processes create. To resolve discrepancies between models and observations, the stellar astrophysics community should distinguish between these processes and parameterize each of them separately in 1D evolutionary models.

Overshooting of turbulent motions from convective regions into adjacent stably stratified zones plays a significant role in stellar interior dynamics, as this process may lead to mixing of chemical species and contribute to the transport of angular momentum and magnetic fields. We present a series of fully nonlinear, three-dimensional (3D) anelastic simulations of overshooting convection in a spherical shell that are focused on the dependence of the overshooting dynamics on the density stratification and the rotation, both key ingredients in stars that however have not been studied systematically together via global simulations. We demonstrate that the overshoot lengthscale is not simply a monotonic function of the density stratification in the convective region, but instead it depends on the ratio of the density stratifications in the two zones. Additionally, we find that the overshoot lengthscale decreases with decreasing Rossby number Ro and scales as Ro^0.23 while it also depends on latitude with higher Rossby cases leading to a weaker latitudinal variation. We examine the mean flows arising due to rotation and find that they extend beyond the base of the convection zone into the stable region. Our findings may provide a better understanding of the dynamical interaction between stellar convective and radiative regions, and motivate future studies particularly related to the solar tachocline and the implications of its overlapping with the overshoot region.

Motivated by the dynamics in the deep interiors of many stars, we study the interaction between overshooting convection and the large-scale poloidal fields residing in radiative zones. We have run a suite of 3D Boussinesq numerical calculations in a spherical shell that consists of a convection zone with an underlying stable region that initially compactly contains a dipole field. By varying the strength of the convective driving, we find that, in the less turbulent regime, convection acts as turbulent diffusion that removes the field faster than solely molecular diffusion would do. However, in the more turbulent regime, turbulent pumping becomes more efficient and partially counteracts turbulent diffusion, leading to a local accumulation of the field below the overshoot region. These simulations suggest that dipole fields might be confined in underlying stable regions by highly turbulent convective motions at stellar parameters. The confinement is of large-scale field in an average sense and we show that it is reasonably modeled by mean-field ideas. Our findings are particularly interesting for certain models of the Sun, which require a large-scale, poloidal magnetic field to be confined in the solar radiative zone in order to explain simultaneously the uniform rotation of the latter and the thinness of the solar tachocline.

In this paper, we investigate the dynamics of convection in a spherical shell under the Boussinesq approximation but considering the compressibility which arises from a non zero adiabatic temperature gradient, a relevant quantity for gaseous objects such as stellar or planetary interiors. We find that depth-dependent superiadiabaticity, combined with the use of mixed boundary conditions (fixed flux/fixed temperature), gives rise to unexpected dynamics that were not previously reported.