Bending Instabilities in Magnetized Accretion Discs

We study the global bending modes of a thin annular disc subject to both an internally generated magnetic field and a magnetic field due to a dipole embedded in the central star with axis aligned with the disc rotation axis. When there is a significant inner region of the disc corotating with the star, we find spectra of unstable bending modes. These may lead to elevation of the disc above the original symmetry plane facilitating accretion along the magnetospheric field lines. The resulting non-axisymmetric disc configuration may result in the creation of hot spots on the stellar surface and the periodic photometric variations observed in many classical T Tauri stars (CTTS). Time-dependent behaviour may occur including the shadowing of the central source in magnetic accretors even when the dipole and rotation axes are aligned.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. 18 pages, 11 figures. LaTeX2e in the MN style. PostScript and HTML files are also available from http://www-star.qmw.ac.uk/~va/ or by e-mail: [email protected]

Accretion disc-stellar magnetosphere interaction: field line inflation and the effect on the spin-down torque

We calculate the structure of a force-free magnetosphere which is assumed to corotate with a central star and which interacts with an embedded differentially rotating accretion disc. The magnetic and rotation axes are aligned and the stellar field is assumed to be a dipole. We concentrate on the case when the amount of field line twisting through the disc-magnetosphere interaction is large and consider different outer boundary conditions. In general the field line twisting produces field line inflation (eg. Bardou & Heyvaerts 1996) and in some cases with large twisting many field lines can become open. We calculate the spin-down torque acting between the star and the disc and we find that it decreases significantly for cases with large field line twisting. This suggests that the oscillating torques observed for some accreting neutron stars could be due to the magnetosphere varying between states with low and high field line inflation. Calculations of the spin evolution of T Tauri stars may also have to be revised in light of the significant effect that field line twisting has on the magnetic torque resulting from star-disc interactions.Comment: Accepted by MNRAS. 21 pages, 15 figures. LaTeX2e in the MN style. PostScript files are also available from http://www-star.qmw.ac.uk/~va/ or by e-mail: [email protected]