Abstract
There are good reasons for believing that the sun has a strong toroidal magnetic field in the stably-stratified region of convective overshoot sandwiched between the radiative zone and convective zone proper. We have modelled the magnetic field in this region by studying the behaviour of a layer of uniform field embedded in a sub-adiabatic atmosphere. Since the field can support extra mass, such a configuration is top-heavy and instabilities of the Rayleigh-Taylor type can occur. By numerical integration of the 2-dimensional compressible MHD equations we have followed the evolution of this instability into the nonlinear regime. The initial buoyancy-driven instability of the magnetic field gives rise to strong shearing motions, thereby exciting secondary Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities which wrap the gas into regions of intense vorticity. The somewhat surprising subsequent motions are determined primarily by the strong interactions between vortices.
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