Related papers: The Role of Magnetic Helicity in Coronal Heating
Two of the most important features of the solar atmosphere are its hot, smooth coronal loops and the concentrations of magnetic shear, known as filament channels, that reside above photospheric polarity inversion lines (PILs). The shear…
Two of the most widely observed and yet most puzzling features of the Sun's magnetic field are coronal loops that are smooth and laminar and prominences/filaments that are strongly sheared. These two features would seem to be quite…
Three of the most important and most puzzling features of the Sun's atmosphere are the smoothness of the closed field corona, the accumulation of magnetic shear at photospheric polarity inversion lines (PIL), and the complexity of the slow…
The origin and evolution of the magnetic helicity in the solar corona are not well understood. For instance, the magnetic helicity of an active region is often about $10^{42}$ Mx$^2$ ($10^{26}$ Wb$^{2}$), but the observed processes whereby…
A theory for the heating of coronal magnetic flux ropes is developed. The dissipated magnetic energy has two distinct contributions: (1) energy injected into the corona as a result of granule-scale, random footpoint motions, and (2) energy…
The most important factors determining solar coronal activity are believed to be the availability of magnetic free energy and the constraint of magnetic helicity conservation. Direct measurements of the helicity and magnetic free energy in…
It is clear that the solar corona is being heated and that coronal magnetic fields undergo reconnection all the time. Here we attempt to show that these two facts are in fact related - i.e. coronal reconnection generates heat. This attempt…
The Sun's outer atmosphere, the corona, is maintained at mega-Kelvin temperatures and fills the heliosphere with a supersonic outflowing wind. The dissipation of magnetic waves and direct electric currents are likely to be the most…
Magnetic helicity quantifies how globally sheared and/or twisted is the magnetic field in a volume. This quantity is believed to play a key role in solar activity due to its conservation property. Helicity is continuously injected into the…
The heating of the solar chromosphere and corona to the observed high temperatures, imply the presence of ongoing heating that balances the strong radiative and thermal conduction losses expected in the solar atmosphere. It has been…
Context. Photospheric motions shuffle the footpoints of the strong axial magnetic field that threads coronal loops giving rise to turbulent nonlinear dynamics characterized by the continuous formation and dissipation of field-aligned…
In the present work we study evolution of magnetic helicity in the solar corona. We compare the rate of change of a quantity related to the magnetic helicity in the corona to the flux of magnetic helicity through the photosphere and find…
Magnetic helicity is a physical quantity that describes field topology. It is also a conserved quantity as Berger in 1984 demonstrated that the total magnetic helicity is still conserved in the corona even when there is a fast magnetic…
By defining an appropriate field line helicity, we apply the powerful concept of magnetic helicity to the problem of global magnetic field evolution in the Sun's corona. As an ideal-magnetohydrodynamic invariant, the field line helicity is…
Context: Relaxation theory offers a straightforward method for estimating the energy that is released when a magnetic field becomes unstable, as a result of continual convective driving. Aims: We present new results obtained from nonlinear…
We demonstrate that conservation of global helicity plays only a minor role in determining the nature and consequences of magnetic reconnection in the solar atmosphere. First, we show that observations of the solar coronal magnetic field…
In this ISSI-supported series of studies on magnetic helicity in the Sun, we systematically implement different magnetic helicity calculation methods on high-quality solar magnetogram observations. We apply finite-volume, discrete flux tube…
The question why the solar corona is much hotter than the visible solar surface still puzzles solar researchers. Most theories of the coronal heating involve a tight coupling between the coronal magnetic field and the associated thermal…
The heating of the lower solar corona is examined using numerical simulations and theoretical models of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence in open magnetic regions. A turbulent energy cascade to small length scales perpendicular to the mean…
A loss of magnetic field confinement is believed to be the cause of coronal mass ejections (CMEs), a major form of solar activity in the corona. The mechanisms for magnetic energy storage are crucial in understanding how a field may possess…