ROAM: a Radial-basis-function Optimization Approximation Method for diagnosing the three-dimensional coronal magnetic field

TL;DR

ROAM is a novel, fast optimization method that combines radial basis functions with sparse sampling to efficiently fit 3D coronal magnetic field models to polarimetric data, aiding in magnetic field diagnosis.

Contribution

The paper introduces ROAM, a new optimization technique that significantly improves the speed and efficiency of fitting coronal magnetic field models to polarimetric measurements.

Findings

ROAM performs well with sparse parameter sampling.

It provides accurate model-data fitting for coronal magnetic fields.

The method is suitable for real-time coronal magnetic field diagnostics.

Abstract

The Coronal Multichannel Polarimeter (CoMP) routinely performs coronal polarimetric measurements using the Fe XIII 10747 $\AA$ and 10798 $\AA$ lines, which are sensitive to the coronal magnetic field. However, inverting such polarimetric measurements into magnetic field data is a difficult task because the corona is optically thin at these wavelengths and the observed signal is therefore the integrated emission of all the plasma along the line of sight. To overcome this difficulty, we take on a new approach that combines a parameterized 3D magnetic field model with forward modeling of the polarization signal. For that purpose, we develop a new, fast and efficient, optimization method for model-data fitting: the Radial-basis-functions Optimization Approximation Method (ROAM). Model-data fitting is achieved by optimizing a user-specified log-likelihood function that quantifies the differences between the observed polarization signal and its synthetic/predicted analogue. Speed and efficiency are obtained by combining sparse evaluation of the magnetic model with radial-basis-function (RBF) decomposition of the log-likelihood function. The RBF decomposition provides an analytical expression for the log-likelihood function that is used to inexpensively estimate the set of parameter values optimizing it. We test and validate ROAM on a synthetic test bed of a coronal magnetic flux rope and show that it performs well with a significantly sparse sample of the parameter space. We conclude that our optimization method is well-suited for fast and efficient model-data fitting and can be exploited for converting coronal polarimetric measurements, such as the ones provided by CoMP, into coronal magnetic field data.