Temperature distribution of a non-flaring active region from simultaneous Hinode XRT and EIS observations

TL;DR

This study combines Hinode XRT and EIS observations to analyze the thermal properties of a non-flaring active region, focusing on the presence of hot plasma and cross-calibration between instruments.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of temperature diagnostics from broad-band and spectral data, and investigates the impact of plasma composition assumptions on results.

Findings

EIS EM(T) is about half of XRT EM(T)

Assuming photospheric composition reduces instrument discrepancy

No conclusive evidence for high-temperature plasma tail

Abstract

We analyze coordinated Hinode XRT and EIS observations of a non-flaring active region to investigate the thermal properties of coronal plasma taking advantage of the complementary diagnostics provided by the two instruments. In particular we want to explore the presence of hot plasma in non-flaring regions. Independent temperature analyses from the XRT multi-filter dataset, and the EIS spectra, including the instrument entire wavelength range, provide a cross-check of the different temperature diagnostics techniques applicable to broad-band and spectral data respectively, and insights into cross-calibration of the two instruments. The emission measure distribution, EM(T), we derive from the two datasets have similar width and peak temperature, but show a systematic shift of the absolute values, the EIS EM(T) being smaller than XRT EM(T) by approximately a factor 2. We explore possible causes of this discrepancy, and we discuss the influence of the assumptions for the plasma element abundances. Specifically, we find that the disagreement between the results from the two instruments is significantly mitigated by assuming chemical composition closer to the solar photospheric composition rather than the often adopted "coronal" composition (Feldman 1992). We find that the data do not provide conclusive evidence on the high temperature (log T[K] >~ 6.5) tail of the plasma temperature distribution, however, suggesting its presence to a level in agreement with recent findings for other non-flaring regions.