Speaker
Description
Recent decades have seen great progress in the experimental investigation of fundamental processes that are relevant to geophysical and astrophysical fluid dynamics. For such studies, liquid metals have proven particularly suited, partly owing to their small Prandtl numbers which are comparable to those in planetary cores and stellar convection zones, partly due to their high electrical conductivity which allows the study of various magnetohydyrodynamic phenomena. After summarizing some theoretical basics, we discuss the most important liquid-metal experiments on Rayleigh-Bénard-convection, Alfvén waves, the magnetorotational and Tayler instability, and the dynamo effect. We recapitulate what has been learned so far from those experiments, and what could be expected from future ones.
