The structure of Taylor's constraint in three dimensions

Abstract

In a 1963 edition of Proc. R. Soc. A , J. B. Taylor (Taylor 1963 Proc. R. Soc. A 9 , 274–283) proved a necessary condition for dynamo action in a rapidly rotating electrically conducting fluid in which viscosity and inertia are negligible. He demonstrated that the azimuthal component of the Lorentz force must have zero average over any geostrophic contour (i.e. a fluid cylinder coaxial with the rotation axis). The resulting dynamical balance, termed a Taylor state, is believed to hold in the Earth's core, hence placing constraints on the class of permissible fields in the geodynamo. Such states have proven difficult to realize, apart from highly restricted examples. In particular, it has not yet been shown how to enforce the Taylor condition exactly in a general way, seeming to require an infinite number of constraints. In this work, we derive the analytic form for the averaged azimuthal component of the Lorentz force in three dimensions after expanding the magnetic field in a truncated spherical harmonic basis chosen to be regular at the origin. As the result is proportional to a polynomial of modest degree (simply related to the order of the spectral expansion), it can be made to vanish identically on every geostrophic contour by simply equating each of its coefficients to zero. We extend the discussion to allow for the presence of an inner core, which partitions the geostrophic contours into three distinct regions.