Physics
Scientific paper
Dec 2001
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2001agufmsh11c0717h&link_type=abstract
American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2001, abstract #SH11C-0717
Physics
7509 Corona, 7524 Magnetic Fields, 7827 Kinetic And Mhd Theory
Scientific paper
Concepts borrowed from magnetospheric physics can be used to develop a three-dimensional theory of magnetostatic structures in the solar corona that simultaneously accounts for the effects of pressure, gravity, and force-free currents. Static here means that time scales are long compared to Alfven and particle transit times along magnetic field lines. As a general matter, it is always possible in principle in quasineutral quasistatic plasma to write a Poisson equation for a magnetic scalar potential, with source term given by the divergence of an effective magnetization; the trick is to determine the magnetization. In the physics of the inner magnetosphere, where slow-flow quasistatic isotropic plasma that neglects gravity and the ion flow velocity provides an adequate description, the magnetization is determined by solving the momentum and charge-conservation equations for the electric current density, which is given explicitly in terms of the curl of a magnetization equal to the product of the magnetic flux-tube volume and the pressure gradient. The salient feature of the analysis that leads to the solution is the constancy of the isotropic pressure along magnetic field lines, a property not present in the corona. However, a suitable mathematical generalization, in which the set of field-line constants that describes quasistatic pressure balance along each magnetic field line replaces the pressure, leads to a simple general expression for the magnetization in the presence of gravity. The resulting Poisson equation, applicable to the lower corona, contains a quite general description of the temperature variation along each field line so that, for example, different heating mechanisms can be included in a simple way. The theory can be extended to include the effects of flow velocity and anisotropic pressure.
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