Characterisation of the turbulent electromotive force and its magnetically-mediated quenching in a global EULAG-MHD simulation of solar convection

Abstract

We perform a mean-field analysis of the EULAG-MHD millenium simulation of global magnetohydrodynamical convection presented in Passos and Charbonneau (2014). The turbulent electromotive force (emf) operating in the simulation is assumed to be linearly related to the cyclic axisymmetric mean magnetic field and its first spatial derivatives. At every grid point in the simulation’s meridional plane, this assumed relationship involves 27 independent tensorial coefficients. Expanding on Racine et al. (2011), we extract these coefficients from the simulation data through a least-squares minimization procedure based on singular value decomposition. The reconstructed α-tensor shows good agreement with that obtained by Racine et al. (2011), who did not include derivatives of the mean-field in their fit, as well as with the α-tensor extracted by Augustson et al. (2015) from a distinct ASH MHD simulation. The isotropic part of the turbulent magnetic diffusivity tensor β is positive definite and reaches values of 5.0×107m2s−1 in the middle of the convecting fluid layers. The spatial variations of both αϕϕ and βϕϕ component are well reproduced by expressions obtained under the Second Order Correlation Approximation, with a good matching of amplitude requiring a turbulent correlation time about five times smaller than the estimated turnover time of the small-scale turbulent flow. By segmenting the simulation data into epochs of magnetic cycle minima and maxima, we also measure α- and β-quenching. We find the magnetic quenching of the α-effect to be driven primarily by a reduction of the small-scale flow’s kinetic helicity, with variations of the current helicity playing a lesser role in most locations in the simulation domain. Our measurements of turbulent diffusivity quenching are restricted to the βϕϕ component, but indicate a weaker quenching, by a factor of ≃1.36, than of the α-effect, which in our simulation drops by a factor of three between the minimum and maximum phases of the magnetic cycle.