A Dynamo Confinement Scenario for the Solar Tachocline and its Implications for Spin-down in the Radiative Spreading Regime

Abstract

At the base of the Sun's convective zone, a narrow shear layer called the tachocline separates strong latitudinal differential rotation above from nearly rigid rotation in the radiative zone below. The observed thinness of the tachocline is a long-standing dynamical puzzle because the tachocline should have spread significantly due to inward-burrowing meridional circulation, also called "radiative spreading." We recently presented the first pair of global simulations to reveal a statistically stationary tachocline confined against radiative spreading by the Maxwell stresses from the large-scale nonaxisymmetric modes of a dynamo, which penetrated into and below the tachocline through a novel magnetic skin effect. In the work presented here, we systematically examine how this "dynamo confinement scenario" works against radiative spreading in a suite of simulations as the governing parameters trend in the direction of the true solar regime. We find that as the stable stratification of the radiative zone is made progressively stronger, the dynamo cycles get longer, the magnetic field consequently penetrates deeper due to the skin effect, and the tachocline becomes more confined. Furthermore, these results have interesting consequences for solar spin-down. In all of our radiatively spreading simulations, the tachocline region spins down due to the burrowing circulation. Below the tachocline, the Maxwell stresses transmit this spin-down further to rigidify the deeper radiative zone. We thus speculate that, in addition to confining the tachocline, the dynamo may provide a pathway to communicate spin-down from the near-surface layers to the deep interior.