  High-latitude laminar confinement of the Sun's interior magnetic field is
shown to be possible, as originally proposed by Gough and McIntyre (1998) but
contrary to a recent claim by Brun and Zahn (A&A 2006). Mean downwelling as
weak as 2x10^-6cm/s -- gyroscopically pumped by turbulent stresses in the
overlying convection zone and/or tachocline -- can hold the field in
advective-diffusive balance within a confinement layer of thickness scale ~
1.5Mm ~ 0.002 x (solar radius) while transmitting a retrograde torque to the
Ferraro-constrained interior. The confinement layer sits at the base of the
high-latitude tachocline, near the top of the radiative envelope and just above
the `tachopause' marking the top of the helium settling layer. A family of
exact, laminar, frictionless, axisymmetric confinement-layer solutions is
obtained for uniform downwelling in the limit of strong rotation and
stratification. A scale analysis shows that the flow is dynamically stable and
the assumption of laminar flow realistic. The solution remains valid for
downwelling values of the order of 10^-5cm/s but not much larger. This suggests
that the confinement layer may be unable to accept a much larger mass
throughput. Such a restriction would imply an upper limit on possible internal
field strengths, perhaps of the order of hundreds of gauss, and would have
implications also for ventilation and lithium burning.
  The solutions have interesting chirality properties not mentioned in the
paper owing to space restrictions, but described at
http://www.atmos-dynamics.damtp.cam.ac.uk/people/mem/papers/SQBO/solarfigure.html
