A Magnetofrictional Model to Study the Solar Corona

Panja, Mayukh (2016) A Magnetofrictional Model to Study the Solar Corona. Masters thesis, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata.

PDF (MS dissertation of Mayukh Panja (14MR002)) Mayukh_Panja_Thesis.pdf - Submitted Version Restricted to Repository staff only Download (2MB)

Abstract

The solar corona spews out vast amounts of magnetized plasma into the heliosphere which has a direct impact on our space environment and on the Earth’s magnetosphere. Thus it is important that we develop an understanding of the dynamics of the solar corona. With our present technology it has not been possible to observationally constrain the 3D magnetic topology of the solar corona. This warrants the use of numerical simulations to study the coronal magnetic field. A very popular method of doing this, is to extrapolate the photospheric magnetic field using Non-Linear-Force-Free or Potential Field Source Surface techniques. However the extrapolations at different time intervals are completely independent of each other and do not capture the temporal evolution of magnetic fields. On the other hand full MHD simulations of the global coronal field, apart from being computationally very expensive would be physically less transparent, owing to the large number of free parameters that are typically used in such codes. This brings us to the Magneto-frictional model which is relatively simpler and computationally more economic. In this thesis we have developed a magnetofrictional model which we have subsequently validated with simple test cases. Having established the validity of our code we proceed to study the twisting of active regions by applying appropriate photospheric velocities and explore the subsequent dynamics.

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