Magnetic Fields in Interacting Binaries

Abstract

Wickramasinghe et al. (2014) and Briggs et al. (2015) have proposed that the strong magnetic fields observed in some single white dwarfs (MWDs) are formed by a dynamo driven by differential rotation when two stars, the more massive one with a degenerate core, merge during common envelope (CE) evolution (Ferrario et al., 2015b). We synthesize a population of binaries to investigate if fields in the magnetic cataclysmic variables (MCVs) may also originate during stellar interaction in the CE phase.