1.5 Organization of review
The remainder of this review is organized in five sections. In Section 2 the mathematical formulation of
the solar dynamo problem is laid out in some detail, together with the various simplifications that are
commonly used in modelling. Section 3 details various possible physical mechanisms of magnetic field
generation. In Section 4, a selection of representative models relying on different such mechanisms are
presented and critically discussed, with abundant references to the technical literature. Section 5 focuses on
the origin of cycle amplitude fluctuations, again presenting some illustrative model results and
reviewing recent literature on the topic. The concluding Section 6 offers a somewhat more
personal (i.e., even more biased!) discussion of current challenges and trends in solar dynamo
modelling.
A great many review papers have been and continue to be written on dynamo models of the solar cycle,
and the solar dynamo is discussed in most recent solar physics textbooks, notably Stix (2002) and
Foukal (2004). The series of review articles published in Proctor and Gilbert (1994) and Ferriz-Mas and
Núñez (2003) are also essential reading for more in-depth reviews of some of the topics covered here.
Among the most recent reviews, Petrovay (2000
); Tobias (2002); Rüdiger and Arlt (2003); Usoskin and
Mursula (2003), and Ossendrijver (2003) offer (in my opinion) particularly noteworthy alternate and/or
complementary viewpoints to those expressed here.
