Magnetic geodynamics

Several decades since the work E. P. Velikhov, Zh. Éksp. Teor. Fiz. 36, 1398 (1959) [Sov. Phys. JETP 9, 995 (1959)] [1] concerning magnetorotational instability was published, great astrophysical interest has been manifested in the mechanism of generating a magnetic field in a rotating well-conducting medium in view of difficulties in the development of the theory of anomalous matter transfer in accretion discs both upon the formation of stars and planets from gaseous conglomerations and upon the formation of a galactic core with a black hole at the center { S. A. Balbus and J. F. Hawley, Astrophys. J. 376, 214 (1991) [2] and G. Ruediger and R. Hollerbach, The Magnetic Universe (Wiley-VCH, Weinheim, 2004) [3]}. Attempts to experimentally observe the magnetorotational instability were successful only for spherical geometry in experiments initially devoted to the verification of geomagnetic dynamo theory {D. R. Sisan et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 114502 (2004) [4]}. In experiments with liquid sodium in the complete absence of temperature gradients and, therefore, convection, which is very important for the conventional theory of the geomagnetic dynamo, the generation of the magnetic field was obtained due to the development of the magnetorotational instability, which is usually ignored when developing the theory of the origin of the Earth’s magnetic field. The results obtained in this work enable one to develop a theory of geomagnetic dynamo that is primarily based on the magnetorotational instability, which provides a new insight into not only the origin of the Earth’s magnetic field but its evolution in time.