Effects of partitioning and extrapolation on the connectivity of potential magnetic fields

TL;DR

This paper investigates how partitioning parameters and modeling choices affect the connectivity of potential magnetic fields in the solar corona, providing insights into the robustness of connectivity calculations under different assumptions.

Contribution

It analyzes the dependence of magnetic field connectivity on partitioning algorithms and boundary conditions, quantifying differences across various modeling approaches.

Findings

Connectivity scales with the number of regions, not the square of possible connections.

Differences in connectivity between modeling methods are generally within 15%.

Point source approximation differs by about 6% from using the exact magnetogram.

Abstract

Coronal magnetic field may be characterized by how its field lines interconnect regions of opposing photospheric flux -- its connectivity. Connectivity can be quantified as the net flux connecting pairs of opposing regions, once such regions are identified. One existing algorithm will partition a typical active region into a number of unipolar regions ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred, depending on algorithmic parameters. This work explores how the properties of the partitions depend on some algorithmic parameters, and how connectivity depends on the coarseness of partitioning for one particular active region magnetogram. We find the number of connections among them scales with the number of regions even as the number of possible connections scales with its square. There are several methods of generating a coronal field, even a potential field. The field may be computed inside conducting boundaries or over an infinite half-space. For computation of connectivity, the unipolar regions may be replaced by point sources or the exact magnetogram may be used as a lower boundary condition. Our investigation shows that the connectivities from these various fields differ only slightly -- no more than 15%. The greatest difference is between fields within conducting walls and those in the half-space. Their connectivities grow more different as finer partitioning creates more source regions. This also gives a quantitative means of establishing how far away conducting boundaries must be placed in order not to significantly affect the extrapolation. For identical outer boundaries, the use of point sources instead of the exact magnetogram makes a smaller difference in connectivity: typically 6% independent of the number of source regions.