On the extrapolation of magneto-hydro-static equilibria on the sun

TL;DR

This paper presents a new magneto-hydro-static (MHS) extrapolation method for modeling the solar interface region, accurately capturing plasma forces in the photosphere and chromosphere using an optimization approach with vector magnetogram data.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel MHS extrapolation technique that does not require pressure measurements and demonstrates high accuracy in recovering reference models.

Findings

The MHS extrapolation accurately reproduces reference models.

It works effectively without pressure measurements on the photosphere.

The method is more computationally intensive than NLFFF extrapolation.

Abstract

Modeling the interface region between solar photosphere and corona is challenging, because the relative importance of magnetic and plasma forces change by several orders of magnitude. While the solar corona can be modeled by the force-free assumption, we need to take care about plasma forces (pressure gradient and gravity) in photosphere and chromosphere, here within the magneto-hydro-static (MHS) model. We solve the MHS equations with the help of an optimization principle and use vector magnetogram as boundary condition. Positive pressure and density are ensured by replacing them with two new basic variables. The Lorentz force during optimization is used to update the plasma pressure on the bottom boundary, which makes the new extrapolation works even without pressure measurement on the photosphere. Our code is tested by using a linear MHS model as reference. From the detailed analyses, we find that the newly developed MHS extrapolation recovers the reference model at high accuracy. The MHS extrapolation is, however, numerically more expensive than the nonlinear force-free field (NLFFF) extrapolation and consequently one should limit their application to regions where plasma forces become important, e.g. in a layer of about 2 Mm above the photosphere.