MHD simulations of the magnetorotational instability in a shearing box with zero net flux. I. The issue of convergence

Understand

We study the properties of MHD turbulence driven by the magnetorotational instability (MRI) in accretion disks.

• We adopt the local shearing box model and focus on the special case for which the initial magnetic flux threading the disk vanishes.
• We employ the finite difference code ZEUS to evolve the ideal MHD equations.
• Performing a set of numerical simulations in a fixed computational domain with increasing resolution, we demonstrate that turbulent activity decreases as resolution increases.