摘要: The solar cycle is a magneto-fluid-dynamical process whose intensity variescyclically in a time of about eleven years. Its arrhythmias reveal it to be a chaotic process that has intermissions every few hundred years. Our aim in th... 展开 The solar cycle is a magneto-fluid-dynamical process whose intensity variescyclically in a time of about eleven years. Its arrhythmias reveal it to be a chaotic process that has intermissions every few hundred years. Our aim in this project is to capture the essential physical mechanisms underlying this behavior and to describe it in a mathematically simple model. We have studied the mathematical form such models may take and seen the causes of intermittency. We have isolated the probable seat of the solar cycle in the shear layer recently detected by helioseismology just below the convection zone. We call this layer the solar tachyline because of certain analogies to the oceanic thermocline. Using the methods of bifurcation theory to describe the nonlinear dynamics of this layer, we have uncovered a spatio-temporal behavior like that of the butterfly diagram characterizing the sunspot cycle. And, finally, we have uncovered in the turbulence of the tachycline, a promising mechanism for the formation of sunspots that is linked to the processes of vortex formation in geophysical fluid dynamics. 收起