Ca. Tout et Je. Pringle, CAN A DISC DYNAMO GENERATE LARGE-SCALE MAGNETIC-FIELDS, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 281(1), 1996, pp. 219-225
A dynamo process of some kind is widely believed to be able to operate
in accretion discs and simple physical considerations suggest that fi
elds generated in this way would have a canonical length-scale of the
order of the disc thickness, H. However, in order to drive a hydromagn
etic wind from a radius, R, it seems likely that the disc must be thre
aded by poloidal magnetic fields with length-scales of order R or grea
ter. We investigate how an inverse cascade process, involving reconnec
tion of magnetic loops above and below the disc, might, in principle,
lead to large-scale fields being generated by the dynamo.