ABSTRACT
Thermal convection has been thought to playa role in the evolution of low-mass disks composed of gas and dust orbiting young stars through the outward radial transport of angular momentum generated by turbulence in the presence of differential rotation. This would cause disk material in convectively unstable regions to spiral inwards to be processed by the central star. Standard phenomenological models of Reynolds stresses used in the previous decade give reasonable evolutionary time scales compared with those deduced from observational surveys of young stellar systems. However, results from recent hydrodynamical simulations of this flow situation contradict the standard models, indicating that net angular momentum transport due to convection tends to be directed inward and that the mean flow gains energy at the expense of smaller scale convective motions. The character of disk convection and the implications for disk structure suggested by the hydrodynamic simulation results are discussed in this paper.
