Modelling the magnetic structure of a large-scale horse-shoe-like filament in a decaying and diffuse active region

TL;DR

This paper reconstructs the magnetic structure of a large, horse-shoe-shaped solar filament in a diffuse active region using a regularized Biot-Savart laws method, revealing detailed magnetic and plasma configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a data-constrained, non-linear force-free field modeling approach for a complex filament in a weak magnetic environment, overcoming limitations of existing extrapolation methods.

Findings

Successful reconstruction of the filament's magnetic configuration.

Magnetic dips align with Hα features, indicating cold plasma in lower regions.

Magnetic and current enhancements are near the filament's inner edge.

Abstract

A large-scale, horse-shoe-like filament was investigated and the magnetic field around it was reconstructed. This is an intermediate filament (IF) that appeared on the solar disk for the first time at 02:00 UT on 2015 November 7, and took 8 days to move to the central median on the solar disk. The active region AR 12452 around which the filament occurred was diffuse so that the magnetic field nearby was weak, the average field strength is 106 G. Therefore, the existing approaches to extrapolating the coronal magnetic field and to constructing the filament configuration in the region with strong background field do not work well here. On the basis of the regularized Biot-Savart laws method, we successfully constructed a data-constrained, non-linear force-free field configuration for this IF observed on 2015 November 14. The overall IF configuration obtained in this way matches well the morphology suggested by a 304~\AA \ image taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on board Solar Dynamics Observatory. Magnetic dips in the configuration were coincident in space with the H$\alpha$ features of the filament, which is lower in altitude than the features seen in 304~\AA. This suggests that the cold plasma fills the lower part of the filament, and hot plasma is situated in the higher region. A quasi-separatrix layer wraps the filament, and both the magnetic field and the electric current are stronger near the inner edge of the filament.