Time and spatial damping of transverse magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) kink
oscillations is a source of information on the cross-field variation of the
plasma density in coronal waveguides. We show that a probabilistic approach to
the problem of determining the density structuring from the observed damping of
transverse oscillations enables us to obtain information on the two parameters
that characterise the cross-field density profile. The inference is performed
by computing the marginal posterior distributions for density contrast and
transverse inhomo- geneity length-scale using Bayesian analysis and damping
ratios for transverse oscillations under the assumption that damping is
produced by resonant absorption. The obtained distributions show that, for
damping times of a few oscillatory periods, low density contrasts and short
inho- mogeneity length scales are more plausible in explaining observations.
This means that valuable information on the cross-field density profile can be
obtained even if the inversion problem, with two unknowns and one observable,
is a mathematically ill-posed problem.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepte
