The Effect of Variable Background on Oscillating Hot Coronal Loop due to Thermal Conduction

TL;DR

This paper models how a time-dependent cooling background in hot coronal loops affects the behavior of standing acoustic waves, revealing significant damping effects due to thermal conduction with theoretical and observational agreement.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical model for the impact of a variable, cooling background on standing acoustic waves in coronal loops, incorporating thermal conduction effects and matching observations.

Findings

Cooling background causes strong damping of standing waves.

Higher thermal conductivity increases wave amplitude decay.

Model predictions align well with observed loop oscillations.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of a variable, i.e. time-dependent, background on the standing acoustic (i.e. longitudinal) modes generated in a hot coronal loop. A theoretical model of 1D geometry describing the coronal loop is applied. The background temperature is allowed to change as a function of time and undergoes an exponential decay with characteristic cooling times typical for coronal loops. The magnetic field is assumed to be uniform. Thermal conduction is the dominant mechanism of cooling the hot background plasma in the presence of an unspecified thermodynamic source that maintains the initial equilibrium. The influence of the rapidly cooling background plasma on the behaviour of standing acoustic (longitudinal) waves is investigated analytically. The temporally evolving dispersion relation and wave amplitude are derived by using the WKB theory. An analytic solution for the time-dependent amplitude that describes the influence of thermal conduction on the standing longitudinal (acoustic) wave is obtained by exploiting the properties of Sturm-Liouville problems. Next, numerical evaluations further illustrate the behaviour of the standing acoustic waves in a system with variable, time dependent background. The results are applied to a number of detected loop oscillations. We find a remarkable agreement between the theoretical predictions and the observations. The cooling of the background plasma due to thermal conduction is found to cause a strong damping for the slow standing magneto-acoustic waves in hot coronal loops in general. Further to this, the increase in the value of thermal conductivity leads to a strong decay in the amplitude of the longitudinal standing slow MHD waves.