Direct numerical simulation of internal wave attractors

by Boris Dintrans (Nordita)

Wednesday 16 Dec 2009, 13:30 → 14:30 Europe/Stockholm

122:026

I will present the first simulations of internal wave attractors done with the Pencil Code. Internal waves are gravity waves that propagate only in stably-stratified regions like the radiative zones of stars. When the pulsating star rotates rapidly (rotation period of the same order than the oscillation one), a fascinating feature appears as the wave energy can be focused along attractors. As a consequence, the resulting oscillation spectrum is a mixture of normal eigenmodes and singular ones depending on the associated orbit of characteristics (i.e. ergodic or focused). I will review both experiments and numerical simulations of this phenomenon that appears in non-separable geometries.