Testing Alfvén wave propagation in a “realistic” set-up of the solar atmosphere

ABSTRACT

We present a radiative magneto-hydrodynamic simulation set-up using the pencil code to study the generation, propagation and dissipation of Alfvén waves in the solar atmosphere which includes a convective layer, photosphere below and chromosphere, transition region and the corona above. We prepare a set-up of steady-state solar convection where the imposed external magnetic field also has reached the final value gradually starting from a very small value. From that state, we start several simulations by varying the magnetic Prandtl number and the forcing strengths. We find the propagation characteristics of waves excited in this simulation run depend strongly on the magnetic Prandtl number and the wave number of the forcing. For magnetic Prandtl number of unity, we obtain localised heating in the corona due to shock dissipation.

KEYWORDS:

• Magneto-hydrodynamics
• Alfvén waves
• solar-atmosphere

Acknowledgments

We thank the two anonymous referees for carefully reviewing the manuscript which has lead to considerable improvement upon its clarity. We acknowledge the computing time awarded on PARAM Yuva-II supercomputer at C-DAC, India under the grant name Hydromagnetic-Turbulence-PR. Most of the simulation runs were carried out on the HPC cluster, Nova, of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. We thank P.A. Bourdin and Jörn Warnecke for discussions on the code especially related to the solar corona module. We also thank Sahel Dey, for his project work on dispersion relations of Alfvén waves.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Piyali Chatterjee  http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0181-2495

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with a minor change. This change does not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 https://github.com/pencil-code/