Comparison of Methods for modelling Coronal Magnetic Fields

TL;DR

This paper compares four approximate methods for modeling coronal magnetic fields with full MHD simulations, evaluating their accuracy and limitations across different plasma conditions and displacements.

Contribution

It provides a systematic comparison of approximate modeling approaches against full MHD simulations for coronal magnetic fields, highlighting their respective accuracies and failure modes.

Findings

Relaxation method is highly accurate for force-free equilibria.

1D approach accurately describes equilibria away from boundary layers.

Linearised MHD predicts boundary layers but fails for large displacements.

Abstract

Four different approximate approaches used to model the stressing of coronal magnetic fields due to an imposed photospheric motion are compared with each other and the results from a full time-dependent magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) code. The assumptions used for each of the approximate methods are tested by considering large photospheric footpoint displacements. We consider a simple model problem, comparing the full nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic evolution, determined with the Lare2D numerical code, with four approximate approaches. Two of these, magneto-frictional relaxation and a quasi-1D Grad-Shafranov approach, assume sequences of equilibria, whilst the other two methods, a second-order linearisation of the MHD equations and Reduced MHD, are time-dependent. The relaxation method is very accurate compared to full MHD for force-free equilibria for all footpoint displacements but has significant errors when the plasma $\beta_0$ is of order unity. The 1D approach gives an extremely accurate description of the equilibria away from the photospheric boundary layers, and agrees well with Lare2D for all parameter values tested. The linearised MHD equations correctly predict the existence of photospheric boundary layers that are present in the full MHD results. As soon as the footpoint displacement becomes a significant fraction of the loop length, the RMHD method fails to model the sequences of equilibria correctly. The full numerical solution is interesting in its own right, and care must be taken for low $\beta_0$ plasmas if the viscosity is too large.