Energy Release in Tangled Magnetic Fields

Details Energy Release in Tangled Magnetic Fields Energy Release in Tangled Magnetic Fields

May 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...210.5303k&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #53.03; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.164

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

A highly promising picture of coronal heating, first advocated by G. Parker, involves elemental magnetic flux tubes that become tangled by the shuffling motions of photospheric convection. The tubes must “reconnect” in the corona in order to avoid a monotonic increase of magnetic stresses. The associated release of energy heats the plasma. In earlier work, we showed that a mechanism called the secondary instability is the likely mechanism of energy release (Dahlburg, Klimchuk, and Antiochos, 2005). The instability occurs within the electric current sheets that separate misaligned tubes and switches on only after the misalignment angle reaches a critical value. It is significant that this angle matches the angle implied by the observed heating requirements of the corona. Though very encouraging, our initial MHD simulations were highly idealized. We have therefore performed new simulations that relax several assumptions by including the effects of finite current sheet size, photospheric line-tying, and time-dependent shearing. These fully 3D simulations of interacting flux tubes provide further evidence for the fundamental role of the secondary instability in coronal heating.
Work supported by NASA and ONR.

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