A selective review is presented of the use of optical, electrical, and electromechanical measurement methodologies of the electric field, charge, conductivity, and permittivity in dielectrics. Kerr electro-optic measurements are presented to demonstrate how volume charge distributions can distort the electric field distribution :significantly and how the field and charge distributions depend on...

The magnetorotational instability (MRI) is thought to play a key role in the formation of stars and black holes by sustaining the turbulence in hydrodynamically stable Keplerian accretion disks. In previous experiments the MRI was observed in a liquid metal Taylor-Couette flow at moderate Reynolds numbers by applying a helical magnetic field. The observation of this helical MRI (HMRI) was inter...

The linear stability of a rotating, stratified, inviscid horizontal plane Couette flow in a channel is studied in the limit of strong rotation and stratification. Two dimensionless parameters characterize the flow: the Rossby number ǫ, defined as the ratio of the shear to the Coriolis frequency and assumed small, and the ratio s of the Coriolis frequency to the buoyancy frequency, assumed to sa...

The stability of wavy supercritical cylindrical Couette flow has been studied extensively, but few measurements of the velocity field in flow have been made. Particle image velocimetry was used to measure the azimuthal and radial velocities in latitudinal planes perpendicular to the axis of rotation for wavy cylindrical Couette flow in the annulus between a rotating inner cylinder and a fixed o...

We present the complete unfolding of streamwise localisation in a paradigm of extended shear flows, namely, two-dimensional plane-Poiseuille flow. Exact solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations are computed numerically and tracked in the streamwise wavenumber Reynolds number parameter space to identify and describe the fundamental mechanism behind streamwise localisation, a ubiquitous feature o...