Topological Methods for the Analysis of Solar Magnetic Fields

By D. Longcope. 2005

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The solar coronal magnetic field is anchored to a complex distribution of photospheric flux consisting of sunspots and magnetic elements. Coronal activity such as flares, eruptions and general heating is often attributed to the manner in which the coronal field responds to photospheric motions. A number of powerful techniques have been developed to characterize the response of the coronal field by describing its topology. According to such analyses, activity will be concentrated around topological features in the coronal field such as separatrices, null points or bald patches. Such topological properties are insensitive to the detailed geometry of the magnetic field and thereby create an analytic tool powerful and robust enough to be useful on complex observations with limited resolution. This article reviews those topological techniques, their developments and applications to observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8e21b2a7fe5a1f8805fbf69e0aaa0d2d08e3cf38

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. G. Aulanier
2. C. Schrijver
3. Etienne Pariat
4. M. Temmer
5. P. Démoulin
6. C. R. DeVore
7. S. Antiochos
8. H. Hudson

Citations in the corpus

• A MODEL FOR SOLAR POLAR JETS (2009, background): “The field lines passing through the null form the well known spine-and-fan topology of the magnetic field (Cowley 1974; Parnell et al. 1996; Longcope 2005), as shown in Figure 1.”
• THE NATURE OF FLARE RIBBONS IN CORONAL NULL-POINT TOPOLOGY (2009, background): “Magnetic field lines going through a three-dimensional null point are of two types (Parnell et al. 1996; Lau & Finn 1990; Longcope 2005): the majority of them forms a surface, the fan of the null.”
• Slip-Running Reconnection in Quasi-Separatrix Layers (2006, background): “During confined and ∗Université Paris 7–Denis Diderot, 75251 Paris Cedex 05, France. eruptive solarflares, this process is believed to occur in magnetic configurations that have a complex topology (see the reviews of Longcope, 2005; Démoulin, 2006).”
• An Observational Overview of Solar Flares (2011, background): “…it has been demonstrated (Des Jardins et al. 2009) that the path of HXR footpoints corresponds to a particular type of topological structure, a subset of the photospheric spine lines identified in magnetic charge topology models (see Longcope, 2005, and the discussion in Section 3.5).”
• Solar Flares: Magnetohydrodynamic Processes (2011, background): “It has been suggested that a number of current sheets are spontaneously formed in the corona (Parker, 1994; Longcope, 2005; Low, 2006).”