Astrophysical Dynamos: before 2009, now, and elsewhere
by
Axel Brandenburg(Nordita)
→
Europe/Stockholm
122:026
122:026
Description
The era of the ERC-supported AstroDyn project at Nordita comes to
an end this month.
What difference did this project make to our understanding?
This can be assessed by recapitulating the situation before 2009.
People just began using the test-field method for calculating mean-field
dynamo coefficients, but now this methods is routinely producing
interesting information.
We did not have any knowledge about the memory effect in turbulent
transport, but now this is quite well understood.
We were worried about the gauge-dependence of magnetic helicity fluxes,
but these worries have now been mostly overcome.
Back in 2008, the original ERC proposal envisaged 14 target points.
Six of them where particularly fruitful in terms of paper output:
Project 9 "CME-like features above dynamos" (6 papers),
Project 10 "Spherical shell dynamos" (7 papers),
Project 12 "Solar dynamos and forecast" (7 papers),
i.e. 62 papers in total, which constitutes a major fraction
of the total output of 105 refereed papers that all acknowledge
the ERC project.
Even the now most producing project 8 was already anticipated as
being important, but we had no idea whether it would work.
It took until 2011 to find out.
In my summary of this ERC project I will contrast early knowledge
prior to 2009 with the current one and its relevance within the
broader context of the field.
