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It has been suggested that the transition between magnetorotationally activeand dead zones in protoplanetary disks should be prone to the excitation ofvortices via Rossby wave instability (RWI). However, the only numericalevidence for this has come from alpha disk models, where the magnetic fieldevolution is not followed, and the effect of turbulence is parametrized byLaplacian viscosity. We aim to establish the phenomenology of the flow in thetransition in 3D resistive-magnetohydrodynamical models. We model thetransition by a sharp jump in resistivity, as expected in the inner dead zoneboundary, using the Pencil Code to simulate the flow. We find that vortices arereadily excited in the dead side of the transition. We measure the massaccretion rate finding similar levels of Reynolds stress at the dead and activezones, at the $\alpha\approx 10^{-2}$ level. The vortex sits in a pressuremaximum and does not migrate, surviving until the end of the simulation. Apressure maximum in the active zone also triggers the RWI. The magnetizedvortex that results should be disrupted by parasitical magneto-ellipticinstabilities, yet it subsists in high resolution. This suggests that eitherthe parasitic modes are still numerically damped, or that the RWI suppliesvorticity faster than they can destroy it. We conclude that the resistivetransition between the active and dead zones in the inner regions ofprotoplanetary disks, if sharp enough, can indeed excite vortices via RWI. Ourresults lend credence to previous works that relied on the alpha-diskapproximation, and caution against the use of overly reduced azimuthal coverageon modeling this transition.

Rossby wave instability at dead zone boundaries in 3D resistive magnetohydrodynamical global models of protoplanetary disks