Completely Detached Magnetic Flux Ropes in the Solar Corona

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Scientific paper

Magnetic flux ropes are common features in the solar corona, and may be sites where magnetic energy is stored prior to coronal mass ejections. One way to generate flux ropes in theoretical models is to begin with a potential field and then shear the magnetic footpoints. The field remains force-free but develops an azimuthal component which, for large shear, can form a flux rope. In idealized axisymmetric situations those ropes are detached from the solar surface and represent new flux not present in the initial potential-field state. The energy they store can exceed substantially the energy of the corresponding fully open field. However, detached ropes that arise from footpoint shear are still embedded in a nonpotential sheared field attached to the coronal base.Here we introduce a two-step procedure for constructing completely detached magnetic flux ropes, in which a detached rope is surrounded completely, both above and below, by potential field. We first build a standard flux rope as the culmination of a sequence of sheared-field solutions with monotonically increasing values for the azimuthal magnetic flux. From there we proceed along another solution sequence, this one constructed by confining the shear at the coronal base to ever-lower solar latitudes. When the confining latitude reaches zero, we have potential field everywhere just above the coronal base, and above that a flux rope. Such flux ropes are characterized by lower magnetic energy than standard flux ropes, and they form higher in the corona. We speculate that these completely detached flux ropes may represent a post-eruption state in a model that lacks sufficiently realistic physics for the ejecta to escape to infinity.This work was supported by NASA grant NNG04GB91G to Middlebury College.

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