Study of Angular Momentum Transport in Hydrodynamic and Magnetohydrodynamic Experiments

Rapid angular momentum transport has been observed to occur in both laboratory fusion plasmas and astrophysical plasmas, but its physical mechanisms still remain illusive. In this paper, we describe a series of laboratory fluid experiments in order to investigate a variety of the proposed mechanisms either in hydrodynamics or magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). They include (1) hydrodynamic turbulence for Keplerian flows\footnote{H. Ji, M. Burin, E. Schartman, and J. Goodman, Nature {\bf 444}, 343 (2006)}, (2) Magnetocoriolis (MC) waves\footnote{M. Nornberg, H. Ji, E. Schartman, A. Roach, and J. Goodman, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 104}, 074501 (2010)}, (3) Magnetorotational Instability (MRI), (4) Rossby waves, and (5) Magneto-Rossby waves. The first three mechanisms have been or are being investigated on the ongoing Princeton MRI experiment (http://mri.pppl.gov) while the last two mechanisms will be investigated on a newly built experiment\footnote{E. Edlund et al., this mini-conference} and on a further modified Princeton MRI experiments. Implications of these experimental results for the astrophysical problems will be discussed.