CME Productivity of Active Regions.

Abstract:

Solar active regions (ARs) are the major sources of two kinds of the most violent solar eruptions, namely flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Although they are believed to be two phenomena in the same eruptive process, the productivity of them could be quiet different for various ARs.

Why is an AR productive? And why is a flare-rich AR CME-poor? To answer these questions, we compared the recent super flare-rich but CME-poor AR 12192, with other four ARs; two were productive in both flares and CMEs and the other two were inert to produce any M-class or intenser flares or CMEs. By investigating the photospheric parameters based on the SDO/HMI vector magnetogram, we find the three productive ARs have larger magnetic flux, current and free magnetic energy than the inert ARs. Furthermore, the two ARs productive in both flares and CMEs contain higher current helicity, concentrating along both sides of the flaring neutral lines, indicating the presence of a seed magnetic structure( that is highly sheared or twisted) of a CME; they also have higher decay index in the low corona, showing weak constraint. The results suggest that productive ARs are always large and have strong current system and sufficient free energy to power flares, and more importantly whether or not a flare is accompanied by a CME is seemingly related to (1) if there is significant sheared or twisted core field serving as the seed of the CME and (2) if the constraint of the overlying arcades is weak enough.

Moreover, some productive ARs may frequently produce more than one CME. How does this happen? We do a statistical investigation of waiting times of quasi-homologous CMEs ( CME ssuccessive originating from the same ARs within short intervals) from super ARs in solar cycle 23 to answer this question. The waiting times of quasi-homologous CMEs have a two-component distribution with a separation at about 18 hours, the first component peaks at 7 hours. The correlation analysis among CME waiting times, CME speeds and CME occurrence rates reveals that these quantities are independent to each other, suggesting that the perturbation by preceding CMEs rather than free energy input be the direct cause of quasi-homologous CMEs. The peak waiting time of 7 hours probably characterize the time scale of the growth of instabilities triggered by preceding CMEs.