Local hydrodynamics and operator stability of Keplerian accretion disks
  We discuss non-self-gravitating hydrodynamic disks in the thin disk limit. These systems are stable according to the Rayleigh criterion, and yet there is some evidence that the dissipative and transport processes in these disks are hydrodynamic in nature at least some of the time. We draw on recent work on the hydrodynamics of laboratory shear flows. Such flows are often experimentally unstable even in the absence of a linear instability. The transition to turbulence in these systems, as well as the large linear transient amplification of initial disturbances, may depend upon the non-self-adjoint nature of the differential operator that describes the dynamics of perturbations to the background state. We find that small initial perturbations can produce large growth in accretion disks in the shearing sheet approximation with shearing box boundary conditions, despite the absence of any linear instability. Furthermore, the differential operator that propagates initial conditions forward in time is asymptotically close (as a function of Reynolds number) to possessing growing eigenmodes. The similarity to the dynamics of laboratory shear flows is suggestive that accretion disks might be hydrodynamically unstable despite the lack of any known instability mechanism. 
Peter Todd Williams