Hale Visiting Faculty

Axel Brandenburg is working in the field of astrophysical fluid dynamics. He is particularly interested in the magnetic field generation from turbulent motions with applications to the Sun and stars, accretion discs, galaxies, and the early Universe. He has been working on accretion disc turbulence to show that the magneto-rotational and dynamo instabilities lead to a sustained doubly-positive feedback. Recently, he has contributed to clarifying the long-standing question of the suppression of the dynamo effect in generating large-scale fields. He is also responsible for the maintenance of the Pencil Code, which is a public domain code (https://github.com/pencil-code) for astrophysical fluid dynamics that is well suited for large clusters with distributed memory.
Featured work:
Brandenburg, A., Schober, J., Rogachevskii, I., et al. 2017 "The Turbulent Chiral Magnetic Cascade in the Early Universe" ApJL, 845, L21
Brandenburg, A., Ashurova, M. B., & Jabbari, S. 2017 "Compensating Faraday Depolarization by Magnetic Helicity in the Solar Corona" ApJL, 845, L15
Brandenburg, A., Mathur, S., & Metcalfe, T. S. 2017 "Evolution of Co-existing Long and Short Period Stellar Activity Cycles" ApJ, 845, 79
Brandenburg, A., Schober, J., & Rogachevskii, I. 2017 "The contribution of kinetic helicity to turbulent magnetic diffusivity" AN, 338, 790
Brandenburg, A., Petrie, G. J. D., & Singh, N. K. 2017 "Two-scale Analysis of Solar Magnetic Helicity" ApJ, 836, 21
Brandenburg, A. 2016 "Stellar Mixing Length Theory with Entropy Rain" ApJ, 832, 6