Ken Hutcheson and David R Fearn
 
A numerical investigation of the stability of an axisymmetric magnetic held is discussed. The magnetic held permeates a finitely conducting fluid contained within a rapidly rotating cylindrical annulus. The fluid is incompressible and viscid. The evolution of a non-axisymmetric perturbation to the axisymmetric magnetic held is governed by the momentum and  induction equations which are integrated using a spectral timestep method. We follow the growth of the perturbation to finite amplitude and find that the character of the solution is dominated by the most unstable axially dependent mode found  from the linear theory.