Enhanced Phase Mixing of Torsional Alfv\'en Waves in Stratified and Divergent Solar Coronal Structures, Paper I: Linear Solutions

TL;DR

This paper presents a corrected analytical solution and a computational tool for studying the enhanced phase mixing of torsional Alfvén waves in stratified, divergent solar coronal magnetic fields, highlighting conditions for maximum wave damping.

Contribution

It introduces a corrected analytical solution and a new code, TAWAS, for modeling torsional Alfvén wave propagation and damping in the solar corona, including wave reflection effects.

Findings

Phase mixing strongest for high-frequency waves in highly divergent fields.

Wave damping is under-reported by the analytical solution beyond the WKB limit.

Both solutions are linear and will be extended to nonlinear MHD in future work.

Abstract

We derive a corrected analytical solution for the propagation and enhanced phase mixing of torsional Alfv\'en waves, in a potential magnetic field with exponentially divergent field lines, embedded in a stratified solar corona. Further we develop a code named TAWAS which calculates the analytic solution describing torsional Alfv\'en waves using IDL software language. We then use TAWAS to demonstrate that both our correction to the analytic solution and the inclusion of wave reflection have a significant impact on Alfv\'en wave damping. We continue to utilise TAWAS by performing a parameter study in order to identify the conditions under which enhanced phase mixing is strongest. We find that phase mixing is the strongest for high frequency Alfv\'en waves in magnetic fields with highly divergent field lines and without density stratification. We then present a finite difference solver, Wigglewave, which solves the linearised evolution equations for the system directly. Comparing solutions from TAWAS and Wigglewave we see that our analytical solution is accurate within the limits of the WKB approximation but under-reports the wave damping, caused by enhanced phase mixing, beyond the WKB limit. Both TAWAS and Wigglewave solve the linearised governing equations and not the complete nonlinear MHD equations. Paper II will consider simulations that solve the full MHD equations including important nonlinear effects.