Paradoxical transitions to instabilities in hydromagnetic Couette-Taylor flows

Abstract

By methods of modern spectral analysis, we rigorously find distributions of eigenvalues of linearized operators associated with an ideal hydromagnetic Couette-Taylor flow. The transition to instability in the limit of a vanishing magnetic field has a discontinuous change compared to the Rayleigh stability criterion for hydrodynamical flows, which is known as the Velikhov-Chandrasekhar paradox. © 2011 American Physical Society.