Magnetohydrodynamic Waves in a Partially Ionized Filament Thread

TL;DR

This study investigates how partial ionization and magnetic diffusion influence wave propagation and damping in solar filament threads, revealing critical wavenumber thresholds and ion-neutral collision effects on wave behavior.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of wave modes in partially ionized filament threads, including analytical and numerical results on frequency cut-offs and damping mechanisms.

Findings

Propagating wave modes are limited by critical wavenumbers.

Magnetic diffusion causes frequency cut-offs for kink and Alfven waves.

Ion-neutral collisions are the dominant damping mechanism at short wavelengths.

Abstract

Oscillations and propagating waves are commonly seen in high-resolution observations of filament threads, i.e., the fine-structures of solar filaments/prominences. Since the temperature of prominences is typically of the order of 10^4 K, the prominence plasma is only partially ionized. In this paper, we study the effect of neutrals on the wave propagation in a filament thread modeled as a partially ionized homogeneous magnetic flux tube embedded in an homogeneous and fully ionized coronal plasma. Ohmic and ambipolar magnetic diffusion are considered in the basic resistive MHD equations. We numerically compute the eigenfrequencies of kink, slow, and Alfven linear MHD modes, and obtain analytical approximations in some cases. We find that the existence of propagating modes is constrained by the presence of critical values of the longitudinal wavenumber. In particular, the lower and upper frequency cut-offs of kink and Alfven waves owe their existence to magnetic diffusion parallel and perpendicular to magnetic field lines, respectively. The slow mode only has a lower frequency cut-off, which is caused by perpendicular magnetic diffusion and is significantly affected by the ionization degree. In addition, ion-neutral collisions is the most efficient damping mechanism for short wavelengths while ohmic diffusion dominates in the long-wavelength regime.