Rayleigh-Bénard instability in a cylinder under influence of rotating and steady magnetic fields

This paper considers numerically the linear and nonlinear instability of a liquid metal in a vertical cylinder with hot bottom, cold top and adiabatic side walls subject to superimposed rotating and steady axisymmetric magnetic fields. In the nonlinear case, a threshold is determined for the global stability against finite size perturbations. It is shown that a proper magnetic field combination stabilizes the system much better than any of the fields separately.