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Turbulent viscosity acting on the equilibrium tidal flow in convective stars

Convection is thought to act as a turbulent viscosity in damping tidal flows and in driving spin and orbital evolution in close convective binary systems. This turbulent viscosity should be reduced, compared to mixing-length predictions, when the forcing (tidal) frequency $|ω_t|$ exceeds the turnover frequency $ω_{cv}$ of the dominant convective eddies. However, two contradictory scaling laws have been proposed and this issue remains highly disputed. To revisit this controversy, we conduct the first direct numerical simulations (DNS) of convection interacting with the equilibrium tidal flow in an idealized global model of a low-mass star. We present direct computations of the turbulent effective viscosity, $ν_E$, acting on the equilibrium tidal flow. We unexpectedly report the coexistence of the two disputed scaling laws, which reconciles previous theoretical (and numerical) findings. We recover the universal quadratic scaling $ν_E \propto (|ω_t|/ω_{cv})^{-2}$ in the high-frequency regime $|ω_t|/ω_{cv} \gg 1$. Our results also support the linear scaling $ν_E \propto (|ω_t|/ω_{cv})^{-1}$ in an intermediate regime with $1 \leq |ω_t|/ω_{cv} = \mathcal{O}(10)$. Both regimes may be relevant to explain the observed properties of close binaries, including spin synchronization of solar-type stars and the circularization of low-mass stars. The robustness of these two regimes of tidal dissipation, and the transition between them, should be explored further in more realistic models. A better understanding of the interaction between convection and tidal flows is indeed essential to correctly interpret observations of close binary stars and short-period planetary orbits.