International Summer Institute for Modeling in Astrophysics

In this project we address the question of whether a flow that is not a dynamo can be made to exhibit dynamo-like properties by feeding it with a small amount of magnetic field. This may be pertinent to the solar dynamo and the processes that sustain it. We present a 3-D fully nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic simulation of the dynamo properties of a time-dependent ABC flow and discuss a method for leaking magnetic field into the computational domain. Our results suggest that sufficient magnetic feeding significantly boosts the magnetic energy of nondynamo flows and can maintain a mangetic field for long times.