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Register a new userFormation of quasi-periodic slow magnetoacoustic wave trains by the heating/cooling misbalance
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Slow magnetoacoustic waves are omnipresent in both natural and laboratory plasma systems. The wave-induced misbalance between plasma cooling and heating processes causes the amplification or attenuation, and also dispersion, of slow magnetoacoustic waves. The wave dispersion could be attributed to the presence of characteristic time scales in the system, connected with the plasma heating or cooling due to the competition of the heating and cooling processes in the vicinity of the thermal equilibrium. We analysed linear slow magnetoacoustic waves in a plasma in a thermal equilibrium formed by a balance of optically thin radiative losses, field-align thermal conduction, and an unspecified heating. The dispersion is manifested by the dependence of the effective adiabatic index of the wave on the wave frequency, making the phase and group speeds frequency-dependent. The mutual effect of the wave amplification and dispersion is shown to result into the occurrence of an oscillatory pattern in an initially broadband slow wave, with the characteristic period determined by the thermal misbalance time scales, i.e. by the derivatives of the combined radiation loss and heating function with respect to the density and temperature, evaluated at the equilibrium. This effect is illustrated by estimating the characteristic period of the oscillatory pattern, appearing because of thermal misbalance in the plasma of the solar corona. It is found that by an order of magnitude the period is about the typical periods of slow magnetoacoustic oscillations detected in the corona.
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The processes of the coronal plasma heating and cooling were previously shown to significantly affect the dynamics of slow magnetoacoustic (MA) waves, causing amplification or attenuation, and also dispersion. However, the entropy mode is also excited in such a thermodynamically active plasma and is affected by the heating/cooling misbalance too. This mode is usually associated with the phenomenon of coronal rain and formation of prominences. Unlike the adiabatic plasmas, the properties and evolution of slow MA and entropy waves in continuously heated and cooling plasmas get mixed. Different regimes of the misbalance lead to a variety of scenarios for the initial perturbation to evolve. In order to describe properties and evolution of slow MA and entropy waves in various regimes of the misbalance, we obtained an exact analytical solution of the linear evolutionary equation. Using the characteristic timescales and the obtained exact solution, we identified regimes with qualitatively different behaviour of slow MA and entropy modes. For some of those regimes, the spatio-temporal evolution of the initial Gaussian pulse is shown. In particular, it is shown that slow MA modes may have a range of non-propagating harmonics. In this regime, perturbations caused by slow MA and entropy modes in a low-$beta$ plasma would look identically in observations, as non-propagating disturbances of the plasma density (and temperature) either growing or decaying with time. We also showed that the partition of the initial energy between slow MA and entropy modes depends on the properties of the heating and cooling processes involved. The obtained exact analytical solution could be further applied to the interpretation of observations and results of numerical modelling of slow MA waves in the corona and the formation and evolution of coronal rain.
Rapidly decaying slow magnetoacoustic waves are regularly observed in the solar coronal structures, offering a promising tool for a seismological diagnostics of the coronal plasma, including its thermodynamical properties. The effect of damping of standing slow magnetoacoustic oscillations in the solar coronal loops is investigated accounting for the field-aligned thermal conductivity and a wave-induced misbalance between radiative cooling and some unspecified heating rates. The non-adiabatic terms were allowed to be arbitrarily large, corresponding to the observed values. The thermal conductivity was taken in its classical form, and a power-law dependence of the heating function on the density and temperature was assumed. The analysis was conducted in the linear regime and in the infinite magnetic field approximation. The wave dynamics is found to be highly sensitive to the characteristic time scales of the thermal misbalance. Depending on certain values of the misbalance time scales three regimes of the wave evolution were identified, namely the regime of a suppressed damping, enhanced damping where the damping rate drops down to the observational values, and acoustic over-stability. The specific regime is determined by the dependences of the radiative cooling and heating functions on thermodynamical parameters of the plasma in the vicinity of the perturbed thermal equilibrium. The comparison of the observed and theoretically derived decay times and oscillation periods allows us to constrain the coronal heating function. For typical coronal parameters, the observed properties of standing slow magnetoacoustic oscillations could be readily reproduced with a reasonable choice of the heating function.
Rapidly propagating fast magnetoacoustic wave trains guided by field-aligned plasma non-uniformities are confidently observed in the Suns corona. Observations at large heights suggest that fast wave trains can travel long distances from the excitation locations. We study characteristic time signatures of fully developed, dispersive fast magnetoacoustic wave trains in field-aligned zero-$beta$ plasma slabs in the linear regime. Fast wave trains are excited by a spatially localised impulsive driver and propagate along the waveguide as prescribed by the waveguide-caused dispersion. In slabs with steeper transverse density profiles, developed wave trains are shown to consist of three distinct phases: a long-period quasi-periodic phase with the oscillation period shortening with time, a multi-periodic (peloton) phase in which distinctly different periods co-exist, and a short-lived periodic Airy phase. The appearance of these phases is attributed to a non-monotonic dependence of the fast wave group speed on the parallel wavenumber due to the waveguide dispersion, and is shown to be different for axisymmetric (sausage) and non-axisymmetric (kink) modes. In wavelet analysis, this corresponds to the transition from the previously known tadpole shape to a new boomerang shape of the wave train spectrum, with two well-pronounced arms at shorter and longer periods. We describe a specific previously published radio observation of a coronal fast wave train, highly suggestive of a change of the wavelet spectrum from a tadpole to a boomerang, broadly consistent with our modelling. The applicability of these boomerang-shaped fast wave trains for probing the transverse structuring of the waveguiding coronal plasma is discussed.
The heating of solar chromospheric inter-network regions by means of the absorption of electromagnetic (EM) waves that originate from the photospheric blackbody radiation is studied in the framework of a plasma slab model. The absorption is provided by the electron-neutral collisions in which electrons oscillate in the EM wave field and electron-neutral collisions damp the EM wave. Given the uncertain nature of the collision cross-section due to the plasma micro-turbulence, it is shown that for plausible physical parameters, the heating flux produced by the absorption of EM waves in the chromosphere is between $20 - 45$ % of the chromospheric radiative loss flux requirement. It is also established that there is an optimal value for the collision cross-section, $5 times 10^{-18}$ m$^{2}$, that produces the maximal heating flux of 1990 W m$^{-2}$.
In contrast with the fast solar wind, that originates in coronal holes, the source of the slow solar wind is still debated. Often intermittent and enriched with low FIP elements -- akin to what is observed in closed coronal loops -- the slow wind could form in bursty events nearby helmet streamers. Slow winds also exhibit density perturbations which have been shown to be periodic and could be associated with flux ropes ejected from the tip of helmet streamers, as shown recently by the WISPR white light imager onboard Parker Solar Probe (PSP). In this work, we propose that the main mechanism controlling the release of flux ropes is a flow-modified tearing mode at the heliospheric current sheet (HCS). We use MHD simulations of the solar wind and corona to reproduce realistic configurations and outflows surrounding the HCS. We find that this process is able to explain long ($sim 10-20$h) and short ($sim 1-2$h) timescales of density structures observed in the slow solar wind. This study also sheds new light on the structure, topology and composition of the slow solar wind, and could be, in the near future, compared with white light and in situ PSP observations.
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