MHD Instability and Turbulence in the Tachocline

The focus of this project was to study the physical processes that govern tachocline dynamics and structure. Specific features explored included stratification, shear, waves, and toroidal and poloidal background fields. In order to address recent theoretical work on anisotropic mixing and dynamics in the tachocline, we were particularly interested in such anisotropic mixing for the specific tachocline processes studied. Transition to turbulence often shapes the largest-scale features that appear spontaneously in a flow during the development of turbulence. The resulting large-scale straining field can control the subsequent dynamics; therefore, anticipation of the large-scale straining field that results for individual realizations of the transition to turbulence can be important for subsequent dynamics, flow morphology, and transport characteristics. As a result, we paid particular attention to the development of turbulence in the stratified and sheared environment of the tachocline. This is complicated by the fact that the linearly stability of sheared MHD flows is non-self-adjoint, implying that normal asymptotic linear stability theory may not be relevant.