Investigating the Role of Diffusivities in Solar Convection Modeling

Authors: Brandon Lazard (Univ. California Los Angeles), Nicholas Featherstone (Southwest Research Institute), Jonathan Aurnou (Univ. California Los Angeles)

Convection plays a dominant role in governing the dynamics within the solar interior and in particular the convection zone. With a large part of the convection zone hidden to observations, our understanding of the dynamics in this region come from theoretical and numerical models. In these models, how the thermal and momentum diffusivity vary within the convection zone is constrained due to limited computational resources. We present results for a series of non-rotating solar convection models with varying functions for the diffusivities. We show that in our models, solar convection is independent of diffusivity as predicted in theoretical models.