17 research outputs found
Extreme Ultra-Violet Spectroscopy of the Lower Solar Atmosphere During Solar Flares
The extreme ultraviolet portion of the solar spectrum contains a wealth of
diagnostic tools for probing the lower solar atmosphere in response to an
injection of energy, particularly during the impulsive phase of solar flares.
These include temperature and density sensitive line ratios, Doppler shifted
emission lines and nonthermal broadening, abundance measurements, differential
emission measure profiles, and continuum temperatures and energetics, among
others. In this paper I shall review some of the advances made in recent years
using these techniques, focusing primarily on studies that have utilized data
from Hinode/EIS and SDO/EVE, while also providing some historical background
and a summary of future spectroscopic instrumentation.Comment: 34 pages, 8 figures. Submitted to Solar Physics as part of the
Topical Issue on Solar and Stellar Flare
Propagating Disturbances in Coronal Loops: A Detailed Analysis of Propagation Speeds
Quasi-periodic disturbances have been observed in the outer solar atmosphere
for many years now. Although first interpreted as upflows (Schrijver et al.
(1999)), they have been widely regarded as slow magnetoacoustic waves, due to
observed velocities and periods. However, recent observations have questioned
this interpretation, as periodic disturbances in Doppler velocity, line width
and profile asymmetry were found to be in phase with the intensity oscillations
(De Pontieu et al. (2010),Tian1 et al. (2011))}, suggesting the disturbances
could be quasi-periodic upflows. Here we conduct a detailed analysis of the
velocities of these disturbances across several wavelengths using the
Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) on board the Solar Dynamics Observatory
(SDO). We analysed 41 examples, including both sunspot and non sunspot regions
of the Sun. We found that the velocities of propagating disturbances (PDs)
located at sunspots are more likely to be temperature dependent, whereas the
velocities of PDs at non sunspot locations do not show a clear temperature
dependence. We also considered on what scale the underlying driver is affecting
the properties of the PDs. Finally, we found that removing the contribution due
to the cooler ions in the 193 A wavelength suggests that a substantial part of
the 193 emission of sunspot PDs can be contributed to the cool component of
193\AA.Comment: 26 Papges, 15 Figure
Collisional and Radiative Processes in Optically Thin Plasmas
Most of our knowledge of the physical processes in distant plasmas is obtained
through measurement of the radiation they produce. Here we provide an overview of the
main collisional and radiative processes and examples of diagnostics relevant to the microphysical
processes in the plasma. Many analyses assume a time-steady plasma with ion
populations in equilibrium with the local temperature and Maxwellian distributions of particle
velocities, but these assumptions are easily violated in many cases. We consider these
departures from equilibrium and possible diagnostics in detail