
Lipunova et al. 2018), magnetic field generation (Boneva et al. 2021), and particle
acceleration (Somov et al. 2003).
The stability of shear hydrodynamic flows with respect to small perturbations in
a magnetic field in laboratory conditions was first considered papers by E. Velikhov
and S. Chandrasekhar (Velikhov 1959, Chandrasekhar 1960). In the absence of mag-
netic field, hydrodynamic instability in a rotating shear flow appears when the angular
momentum decreases outward from the axis of rotation (Lord Rayleigh 1916).
Velikhov and Chandrasekhar showed that in a vertically magnetized, axisymmet-
ric, differentially rotating flow with angular velocity decreasing outward, magnetorota-
tional instability (MRI) is possible.1
The theory of MRI was applied to astrophysical accretion disks in an influential pa-
per by Balbus and Hawley (1991), and it is now believed that this instability generates
turbulence in accretion disks (see review Balbus and Hawley (1998)). Nonlinear nu-
merical simulations (e.g., Hawley et al. 1995, Sorathia et al. 2012, Hawley et al. 2013)
confirm that MRI can indeed sustain turbulence in accretion disks.
It is believed that for the study of MRI and analysis of its properties, a local ap-
proximation in an ideal incompressible fluid is sufficient, where small perturbations
are taken in cylindrical coordinates r,z,φin the form of plane waves ∝ei(ωt−krr−kzz).
In this case, the differential MHD equations are transformed into algebraic equations,
the dispersion relation for perturbations is found in the form of a biquadratic equation
(Balbus and Hawley 1991, Kato et al. 1998), and the instability increment does not
depend on the magnetic field (see Eqs. (77) and (78) below, respectively). Taking into
account non-ideal effects in this approximation slightly changes the conditions for the
occurrence of MRI but leaves qualitatively the same picture (Shakura and Postnov
2015a, Zou et al. 2020).
However, already in the pioneer work of Velikhov (1959), a global analysis of
long-wave disturbances in the direction perpendicular to the plane of the main flow was
carried out for flows between two rotating conducting cylinders with a constant angular
momentum over radius, Ω(r)r2=const. Radial perturbations were found from the
solution of the Sturm-Liouville boundary value problem (in the VKB approximation).
It was shown that such an approach implies a critical magnetic field, above which
instability is suppressed, and the dependence on the boundary conditions remains even
in the case of extending the outer cylinder to infinity.
Due to the potential importance of MRI in the emergence of turbulence in disk
flows (accretion and protoplanetary disks, gaseous disks in galaxies), extensive ana-
lytical and numerical investigations of MRI were conducted in the 1990s-2000s in the
approximation of incompressible fluid in a homogeneous magnetic field, including a
global analysis of this instability. Nonlocal analysis shows that in shear flows, the dis-
persion equation for the mode ω(k) contains a term dependent on radius as ∝ −1/r2,
which is usually neglected in local modal analysis. As expected, a critical value of
magnetic field appears in the global analysis, above which MRI are stabilized (Pa-
paloizou and Szuszkiewicz 1992, Kumar et al. 1994, Gammie and Balbus 1994, Curry
et al. 1994, Latter et al. 2015). For accretion disks around a central gravitational body,
1We consider only the case of a vertical background magnetic field. Axisymmetric gas flows with toroidal
background magnetic fields in the presence of gravity are subject to Parker instability (Parker 1966).
2