Solar ALMA: Observation-Based Simulations of the mm and sub-mm Emissions from Active Regions

TL;DR

This paper introduces an efficient algorithm within the GX Simulator to rapidly generate synthetic mm and sub-mm emission maps of solar active regions, facilitating comparison with observational data from ALMA.

Contribution

The authors developed a fast, integrated algorithm for simulating solar active region emissions in the ALMA spectral range using a 3D modeling tool, enabling quick analysis and comparison.

Findings

Rapid synthesis of AR emission maps in minutes.

Ability to compare synthetic and observed ALMA data.

Integration of multi-wavelength emission modeling.

Abstract

We developed an efficient algorithm integrated in our 3D modeling tool, GX Simulator (Nita et al. 2015), allowing quick computation of the synthetic intensity and polarization maps of solar active regions (AR) in the ALMA spectral range. The algorithm analyzes the photospheric input (white light and magnetogram) to classify a given photospheric pixel to belong to a given photospheric structure. Then, a 1D chromospheric model (Fontenla et al. 2009) is added on top of each pixel, which forms a chromospheric model of the AR. Next step is computation of the mm and sub-mm emission produced from this chromosphere model. A huge advantage of this approach is that emission from any given AR can be synthesized very fast, on the order of a few minutes after the AR selection. Using the GX Simulator tool it is also possible to produce synthetic maps of the microwave (gyroresonance) and EUV emission from the same AR model and compare them with the ALMA synthetic maps and with the corresponding observed microwave and/or EUV data.