Magnetic Taylor-Proudman Constraint Explains Flows into the Tangent Cylinder.

Tangent cylinders (TCs) have shaped our understanding of planetary dynamos and liquid cores. The Taylor-Proudman constraint creates these imaginary surfaces because of planetary rotation, separating polar and equatorial regions, but cannot explain the flows meandering through them. Here, we establish and verify experimentally that magnetic fields aligned with rotation drive flows into TCs, linked to the flows along TCs by a magnetic Taylor-Proudman constraint.

Inverse and Direct Energy Cascades in Three-Dimensional Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence at Low Magnetic Reynolds Number.

This experimental study analyzes the relationship between the dimensionality of turbulence and the upscale or downscale nature of its energy transfers. We do so by forcing low-Rm magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in a confined channel, while precisely controlling its dimensionality by means of an externally applied magnetic field. We first identify a specific length scale l[over ^]_{⊥}^{c} that separates smaller 3D structures from larger quasi-2D ones.

Little Earth Experiment: An instrument to model planetary cores.

In this paper, we present a new experimental facility, Little Earth Experiment, designed to study the hydrodynamics of liquid planetary cores. The main novelty of this apparatus is that a transparent electrically conducting electrolyte is subject to extremely high magnetic fields (up to 10 T) to produce electromagnetic effects comparable to those produced by moderate magnetic fields in planetary cores. This technique makes it possible to visualise for the first time the coupling between the principal forces in a convection-driven dynamo by means of Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) in a geometry relevant to planets.