Zombie Vortices: The {\it Dead} Zones of Protoplanetary Disks are Not Dead

Numerical simulations, using both the anelastic and fully compressible equations of motion, show that the ``dead zones'' of protoplanetary disks (PPDs) around forming stars are unstable and filled with vortex-dominated turbulence with Mach and Rossby numbers of order 0.2 -- 0.3. The {\it dead zones} are regions in which the temperature is too cool for the gas to ionize and be destabilized by instabilities associated with the magnetic field. The ``dead zones'' were thought, by most authors, to be stable to all purely-hydrodynamic instabilities because the flow has an angular momentum that increases with increasing radius in a PPD and is therefore stable by Rayleigh's theorem. However, that theorem in not applicable to stratified flows, such as those in a PPD. We summarize our simulations with emphasis on the finite-amplitude trigger of the instability and show that when the trigger is Kolmogorov noise, the Mach number of the noise that is needed to create instability is proportional to $Re^{-1/2}$, where $Re$ is the Reynolds number of the initial noise.