Standing Sausage Perturbations in solar coronal loops with diffuse boundaries: An initial-value-problem perspective

Abstract

Working in pressureless magnetohydrodynamics, we examine the consequences of some peculiar dispersive properties of linear fast sausage modes (FSMs) in one-dimensional cylindrical equilibria with a continuous radial density profile (ρ 0 (r)). As recognized recently on solid mathematical grounds, cutoff axial wavenumbers may be absent for FSMs when ρ 0 (r) varies sufficiently slowly outside the nominal cylinder. Trapped modes may therefore exist for arbitrary axial wavenumbers and density contrasts, their axial phase speeds in the long-wavelength regime differing little from the external Alfvén speed. If these trapped modes indeed show up in the solutions to the associated initial value problem (IVP), then FSMs have a much better chance to be observed than expected with classical theory, and can be invoked to account for a considerably broader range of periodicities than practiced. However, with axial fundamentals in active region loops as an example, we show that this long-wavelength expectation is not seen in our finite-difference solutions to the IVP, the reason for which is then explored by superposing the necessary eigenmodes to re-solve the IVP. At least for the parameters we examine, the eigenfunctions of trapped modes are characterized by a spatial extent well exceeding the observationally reasonable range of the spatial extent of initial perturbations, meaning a negligible fraction of energy that a trapped mode can receive. We conclude that the absence of cutoff wavenumbers for FSMs in the examined equilibrium does not guarantee a distinct temporal behavior.