Magnetic Influences on Turbulent Heating and Jet Production in Coronal Holes

Abstract:

The heating of the solar wind from open-field regions in the corona is the subject of an ongoing body of work in the solar physics community. We present recent progress to understand the role of Alfvén-wave-driven turbulence in flux tubes open to the heliosphere. Our models use three-dimensional, time-dependent forms of the reduced magnetohydrodynamics equations to find the resulting properties of the solar wind. We use the BRAID model (van Ballegooijen et al., 2011) on open flux tubes that epitomize the most common magnetic structures in the corona: a polar coronal hole, an open flux tube on the boundary of an equatorial streamer, and one that neighbors a strong active region. Our results agree with prior work using the time-steady, one-dimensional ZEPHYR model (Cranmer et al., 2007; Woolsey and Cranmer, 2014). In addition, the time dependence in BRAID lets us explore the bursty, nanoflare-like nature of the heating in these flux tubes. We find that the transient heating can be captured into separate events with an average energy of 10²² erg, with a maximum energy of 10²⁵ erg. The bursty heating lead us to pursue a better understanding of the physical processes responsible for the network jets seen in IRIS data (see e.g. Tian et al., 2014). We search for correlations between the supergranular magnetic field properties—using the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager aboard SDO—and jet productivity to make better estimates of the mass and energy budget of these small-scale features and to find evidence of the mechanisms responsible for the network jets.