EFFECT OF A RADIATION COOLING AND HEATING FUNCTION ON STANDING LONGITUDINAL OSCILLATIONS IN CORONAL LOOPS

Abstract

Standing long-period (with periods longer than several minutes) oscillations in large, hot (with a temperature higher than 3 MK) coronal loops have been observed as the quasi-periodic modulation of the EUV and microwave intensity emission and the Doppler shift of coronal emission lines, and they have been interpreted as standing slow magnetoacoustic (longitudinal) oscillations. Quasi-periodic pulsations of shorter periods, detected in thermal and non-thermal emissions in solar flares could be produced by a similar mechanism. We present theoretical modeling of the standing slow magnetoacoustic mode, showing that this mode of oscillation is highly sensitive to peculiarities of the radiative cooling and heating function. We generalized the theoretical model of standing slow magnetoacoustic oscillations in a hot plasma, including the effects of the radiative losses and accounting for plasma heating. The heating mechanism is not specified and taken empirically to compensate the cooling by radiation and thermal conduction. It is shown that the evolution of the oscillations is described by a generalized Burgers equation. The numerical solution of an initial value problem for the evolutionary equation demonstrates that different dependences of the radiative cooling and plasma heating on the temperature lead to different regimes of the oscillations, including growing, quasi-stationary, and rapidly decaying. Our findings provide a theoretical foundation for probing the coronal heating function and may explain the observations of decayless long-period, quasi-periodic pulsations in flares. The hydrodynamic approach employed in this study should be considered with caution in the modeling of non-thermal emission associated with flares, because it misses potentially important non-hydrodynamic effects.