Deceleration and Dispersion of Large-scale Coronal Bright Fronts

One of the most dramatic manifestations of solar activity are large-scale coronal bright fronts (CBFs) observed in extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images of the solar atmosphere. To date, the energetics and kinematics of CBFs remain poorly understood, due to the low image cadence and sensitivity of previous EUV imagers and the limited methods used to extract the features. In this paper, the trajectory and morphology of CBFs was determined in order to investigate the varying properties of a sample of CBFs, including their kinematics and pulse shape, dispersion, and dissipation. We have developed a semi-automatic intensity profiling technique to extract the morphology and accurate positions of CBFs in 2.5-10 min cadence images from STEREO/EUVI. The technique was applied to sequences of 171A and 195A images from STEREO/EUVI in order to measure the wave properties of four separate CBF events. Following launch at velocities of ~240-450kms^{-1} each of the four events studied showed significant negative acceleration ranging from ~ -290 to -60ms^{-2}. The CBF spatial and temporal widths were found to increase from ~50 Mm to ~200 Mm and ~100 s to ~1500 s respectively, suggesting that they are dispersive in nature. The variation in position-angle averaged pulse-integrated intensity with propagation shows no clear trend across the four events studied. These results are most consistent with CBFs being dispersive magnetoacoustic waves.Comment: 15 pages, 18 figure

On-line PCA with Optimal Regrets

We carefully investigate the on-line version of PCA, where in each trial a learning algorithm plays a k-dimensional subspace, and suffers the compression loss on the next instance when projected into the chosen subspace. In this setting, we analyze two popular on-line algorithms, Gradient Descent (GD) and Exponentiated Gradient (EG). We show that both algorithms are essentially optimal in the worst-case. This comes as a surprise, since EG is known to perform sub-optimally when the instances are sparse. This different behavior of EG for PCA is mainly related to the non-negativity of the loss in this case, which makes the PCA setting qualitatively different from other settings studied in the literature. Furthermore, we show that when considering regret bounds as function of a loss budget, EG remains optimal and strictly outperforms GD. Next, we study the extension of the PCA setting, in which the Nature is allowed to play with dense instances, which are positive matrices with bounded largest eigenvalue. Again we can show that EG is optimal and strictly better than GD in this setting

High cadence observations of a global coronal wave by EUVI/STEREO

We report a large-scale coronal wave (so-called "EIT wave") observed with high cadence by EUVI onboard STEREO in association with the GOES B9.5 flare and double CME event on 19 May 2007. The EUVI instruments provide us with the unprecedented opportunity to study the {\it dynamics} of flare/CME associated coronal waves imaged in the extreme ultraviolet. The coronal wave under study reveals deceleration, indicative of a freely propagating MHD wave. Complementary analysis of the associated flare and erupting filament/CME hint at wave initiation by the CME expanding flanks, which drive the wave only over a limited distance. The associated flare is very weak and occurs too late to account for the wave initiation.Comment: Astrophysical Journal Letters (in press

The{dollar}p{dollar}-Norm Generalization of the LMS Algorithm for Adaptive Filtering

Peer reviewe

Coronal Shock Waves, EUV waves, and their Relation to CMEs. II. Modeling MHD Shock Wave Propagation Along the Solar Surface, Using Nonlinear Geometrical Acoustics

We model the propagation of a coronal shock wave, using nonlinear geometrical acoustics. The method is based on the Wentzel-Kramers-Brillouin (WKB) approach and takes into account the main properties of nonlinear waves: i) dependence of the wave front velocity on the wave amplitude, ii) nonlinear dissipation of the wave energy, and iii) progressive increase in the duration of solitary shock waves. We address the method in detail and present results of the modeling of the propagation of shock-associated extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) waves as well as Moreton waves along the solar surface in the simplest solar corona model. The calculations reveal deceleration and lengthening of the waves. In contrast, waves considered in the linear approximation keep their length unchanged and slightly accelerate.Comment: 15 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Solar Physic

Plasma heating in the very early and decay phases of solar flares

In this paper we analyze the energy budgets of two single-loop solar flares under the assumption that non-thermal electrons are the only source of plasma heating during all phases of both events. The flares were observed by the Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) and Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) on September 20, 2002 and March 17, 2002, respectively. For both investigated flares we derived the energy fluxes contained in non-thermal electron beams from the RHESSI observational data constrained by observed GOES light-curves. We showed that energy delivered by non-thermal electrons was fully sufficient to fulfil the energy budgets of the plasma during the pre-heating and impulsive phases of both flares as well as during the decay phase of one of them. We concluded that in the case of the investigated flares there was no need to use any additional ad-hoc heating mechanisms other than heating by non-thermal electrons.Comment: 22 pages, 10 figures, The Astrophysical Journal (accepted, March 2011

Electron spin coherence in metallofullerenes: Y, Sc and La@C82

Endohedral fullerenes encapsulating a spin-active atom or ion within a carbon cage offer a route to self-assembled arrays such as spin chains. In the case of metallofullerenes the charge transfer between the atom and the fullerene cage has been thought to limit the electron spin phase coherence time (T2) to the order of a few microseconds. We study electron spin relaxation in several species of metallofullerene as a function of temperature and solvent environment, yielding a maximum T2 in deuterated o-terphenyl greater than 200 microseconds for Y, Sc and La@C82. The mechanisms governing relaxation (T1, T2) arise from metal-cage vibrational modes, spin-orbit coupling and the nuclear spin environment. The T2 times are over 2 orders of magnitude longer than previously reported and consequently make metallofullerenes of interest in areas such as spin-labelling, spintronics and quantum computing.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Spectroscopic analysis of interaction between an EIT wave and a coronal upflow region

We report a spectroscopic analysis of an EIT wave event that occurred in active region 11081 on 2010 June 12 and was associated with an M2.0 class flare. The wave propagated near circularly. The south-eastern part of the wave front passed over an upflow region nearby a magnetic bipole. Using EIS raster observations for this region, we studied the properties of plasma dynamics in the wave front, as well as the interaction between the wave and the upflow region. We found a weak blueshift for the Fe XII {\lambda}195.12 and Fe XIII {\lambda}202.04 lines in the wave front. The local velocity along the solar surface, which is deduced from the line of sight velocity in the wave front and the projection effect, is much lower than the typical propagation speed of the wave. A more interesting finding is that the upflow and non-thermal velocities in the upflow region are suddenly diminished after the transit of the wave front. This implies a significant change of magnetic field orientation when the wave passed. As the lines in the upflow region are redirected, the velocity along the line of sight is diminished as a result. We suggest that this scenario is more in accordance with what was proposed in the field-line stretching model of EIT waves.Comment: 13 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in Ap