Coronal seismology of flare-excited longitudinal slow magnetoacoustic waves in hot coronal loops

Abstract:

The flare-excited longitudinal intensity oscillations in hot flaring loops have been recently detected by SDO/AIA in 94 and 131 bandpasses. These oscillations show similar physical properties (such as period, decay time, and trigger) as those slow-mode standing waves previously detected by the SOHO/SUMER spectrometer in Doppler shift of flare lines formed above 6 MK. The multi-wavelength AIA observations with high spatio-temporal resolution and wide temperature coverage enable us to measure both thermal and wave properties of the oscillating hot plasma with unprecedented accuracy. These new measurements can be used to diagnose the complicated energy transport processes in flare plasma by a technique called coronal seismology based on the combination of observations and MHD wave theory. From a detailed case study we have found evidence for thermal conduction suppression in hot loops by measuring the polytropic index and analyzing the phase relationship between the temperature and density wave signals. This result is not only crucial for better understanding the wave dissipation mechanism but also provides an alternative mechanism to explain the puzzles of long-duration events and X-ray loop-top sources which show much slower cooling than expected by the classical Spitzer conductive cooling. This finding may also shed a light on the coronal heating problem because weak thermal conductivity implies slower cooling of hot plasma in nanoflares, so increasing the average coronal temperature for the same heating rate. We will discuss the effects of thermal conduction suppression on the wave damping and loop cooling based on MHD simulations.