On the Extrapolation of Magnetohydrostatic Equilibria on the Sun

Abstract

Modeling the interface region between the solar photosphere and corona is challenging because the relative importance of magnetic and plasma forces change by several orders of magnitude. While the solar corona can be modeled by the force-free assumption, we need to take plasma forces into account (pressure gradient and gravity) in photosphere and chromosphere, here within the magnetohydrostatic (MHS) model. We solve the MHS equations with the help of an optimization principle and use vector magnetogram as the boundary condition. Positive pressure and density are ensured by replacing them with two new basic variables. The Lorentz force during optimization is used to update the plasma pressure on the bottom boundary, which makes the new extrapolation work even without pressure measurements on the photosphere. Our code is tested using a linear MHS model as reference. From the detailed analyses, we find that the newly developed MHS extrapolation recovers the reference model at high accuracy. The MHS extrapolation is, however, numerically more expensive than the nonlinear force-free field extrapolation and consequently one should limit their application to regions where plasma forces become important, e.g., in a layer of about 2 Mm above the photosphere.