Alfvén Waves in the Structured Solar Corona

Abstract

A simple model of a periodic ensemble of closely packed flux tubes sitting atop a vertically stratified layer reveals that an incident fast wave from below preferentially converts almost immediately to Alfvén waves in the flux tubes, with kink waves restricted to at most a very few Fourier modes. This suggests that observations of coronal kink modes in such structured systems may greatly underestimate the net wave energy flux being transported into and through the corona, much of which may reside in harder-to-observe Alfvén waves. The processes of mode conversion/resonant absorption and Alfvén phase mixing are implicated. It is suggested that the Sun's internal p-mode field -- the 5-minute oscillations -- may contribute substantially to the process by supplying incident fast waves in the chromosphere that scatter and mode-convert in the tube ensemble.

13 pages, 17 figures, accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (5)

• Self-consistent Coronal Heating and Solar Wind Acceleration from Anisotropic Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence
• Alfven Waves in the Lower Solar Atmosphere
• Three Dimensional MHD Wave Propagation and Conversion to Alfven Waves near the Solar Surface. I. Direct Numerical Solution
• Energy flux of Alfven waves in weakly ionized plasma
• Resonant Absorption as Mode Conversion? II. Temporal Ray Bundle

Cited by in corpus (6)

• A basal contribution from p-modes to the Alfvénic wave flux in the Sun's corona
• The First Ionization Potential Effect from the Ponderomotive Force: On the Polarization and Coronal Origin of the Alfven Waves
• An Inside Look at Sunspot Oscillations with Higher Azimuthal Wavenumbers
• Wave modes excited by photospheric p-modes and mode conversion in a multi-loop system
• Damping of Propagating Kink Waves in the Solar Corona
• Resonant absorption of surface sausage and surface kink modes under photospheric conditions