English

Effects of field-aligned flows on standing kink and sausage modes supported by coronal loops

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2015-06-17 v2

Abstract

Fundamental standing modes and their overtones play an important role in coronal seismology. We examine how a significant field-aligned flow affects standing modes supported by coronal loops, modeled here as cold magnetic slabs. Of particular interest are the period ratios of the fundamental to its (n1)(n-1)-th overtone (P1/nPnP_1/nP_n) for both kink and sausage modes, and the threshold half-width-to-length ratio for sausage modes. For standing kink modes, the flow significantly reduces P1/nPnP_1/nP_n in general, the effect being particularly strong for larger nn and when the density contrast ρ0/ρe\rho_0/\rho_e between loops and their surroundings is weak. That said, even when ρ0/ρe\rho_0/\rho_e approaches infinity, this effect is still substantial, reducing the minimal P1/nPnP_1/nP_n by up to 13.7% (24.5%) for n=2n=2 (n=4n=4) relative to the static case, when the Alfv\'en Mach number MAM_A reaches 0.8 where MAM_A measures the loop flow speed in units of the internal Alfv\'en speed. For standing sausage modes, though not negligible, the flow effect in reducing P1/nPnP_1/nP_n is not as strong. However, the threshold half-width-to-length ratio is considerably larger in the flowing case than its static counterpart. For ρ0/ρe\rho_0/\rho_e in the range [9,1024][9, 1024] and MAM_A in the range [0,0.5][0, 0.5], an exhaustive parameter study yields that this threshold is well fitted by our Equation (23) which involves the two parameters in a simple way. This allows one to analytically constrain the combination (ρ0/ρe,MA)(\rho_0/\rho_e, M_A) for a loop with known width-to-length ratio when a standing sausage oscillation is identified therein. It also allows one to further examine the idea of partial sausage modes, and the flow is found to reduce significantly the spatial extent where partial modes are allowed.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1309.3484,
  title  = {Effects of field-aligned flows on standing kink and sausage modes supported by coronal loops},
  author = {S. -X. Chen and B. Li and L. -D. Xia and Y. -J. Chen and H. Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1309.3484},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

22 pages, 12 figures, to appear in Solar Physics