Wave heating of the solar atmosphere without shocks

Abstract

Context. We investigate the wave heating problem of a solar quiet region and present its plausible solution without involving shock formation. Aims. We aim to use numerical simulations to study wave propagation and dissipation in the partially ionized solar atmosphere, whose model includes both neutrals and ions. Methods. We used a 2.5D two-fluid model of the solar atmosphere to study the wave generation and propagation. The source of these waves is the solar convection located beneath the photosphere. Results. The energy carried by the waves is dissipated through ion-neutral collisions, which replace shocks used in some previous studies as the main source of local heating in quiet regions. Conclusions. We show that the resulting wave dissipation is sufficient to balance radiative and thermal energy losses, and to sustain a quasi-stationary atmosphere whose averaged temperature profile agrees well with the observationally based semi-empirical model of Avrett & Loeser (2008, ApJS, 175, 229).

Chromospheric heating and generation of plasma outflows by impulsively generated two-fluid magnetoacoustic waves

“…The one-dimensional numerical simulations are performed with the JOANNA code (Wójcik et al 2020b), which solves the above-mentioned two-fluid equations. We assume that the system has a slab geometry and that it is invariant along the xand z-directions (∂/∂x = ∂/∂z = 0), and the z−components of the velocities and the magnetic field are set identically zero (V iz = V nz = B z = 0).…”

“…In this paper we considered two-fluid ion magnetoacoustic and neutral acoustic waves that are initially (at t = 0 s) excited by a pulse in a vertical component of the ion and neutral velocities. The full set of two-fluid equations is solved by the JOANNA code (Wójcik et al 2020b). The results of the numerical simulations presented in this paper can be summarised as follows.…”

“…The authors of the latter paper focused on the acoustic waves with wave periods within the range 30 − 200 s and showed that these waves are able to heat the chromosphere. The idea of heating the solar atmosphere without shock waves was studied by Wójcik et al (2020a) who showed that the thermal energy release ratio during the ion-neutral collisions is sufficient to balance the radiative and thermal energy losses. Recently, Kuźma et al (2021) focused on the studies of ion magnetoacoustic and neutral acoustic waves in a magnetic arcade and found that in the chromosphere the wave characteristics strongly depend on the magnetic field configuration.…”

3D numerical simulations of propagating two-fluid, torsional Alfvén waves and heating of a partially ionized solar chromosphere

“…For instance, Soler et al (2019), using a photospheric broadband driver that contains a spectrum of frequencies corresponding to wave periods ranging from 3.33 s up to 2.78 h, in- and Kuźma et al (2020) revealed a rise of the plasma temperature in the solar atmosphere resulting from the collisional heating. The two-fluid effects also play an important role when non-linear effects become important, particularly in the context of wave damping and plasma heating (e.g., Kuźma et al 2019;Wójcik et al 2020;Zhang et al 2021). On top of that, Murawski et al (2020) demonstrated that ion-neutral collisions may solely solve the heating problem of a quiet region of the chromosphere.…”

Solar chromosphere heating and generation of plasma outflows by impulsively generated two-fluid Alfvén waves

“…( 19) is injected into the simulation domain specified as (−0.08, 0.08) × (−0.5, 60) Mm 2 . We use the JOANNA code (Wójcik et al 2020) to perform the numerical simulations, i.e. to solve the two-fluid equations presented and discussed in the previous section.…”