Estimating Ion Temperatures at the Polar Coronal Hole Boundary [SSA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2209.10686


Physical quantities, such as ion temperature and nonthermal velocity, provide critical information about the heating mechanism of the million-degree solar corona. We determined the possible ion temperature $T_i$ intervals using extreme ultraviolet (EUV) line widths, only assuming that the plasma nonthermal velocity is the same for all ions. We measured ion temperatures at the polar coronal hole boundary simultaneously observed in 2007 by the EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS) on board the Hinode satellite and the Solar Ultraviolet Measurements of Emitted Radiation (SUMER) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). The temperatures of ions with the charge-to-mass ratio ($Z/A$) less than 0.20 or greater than 0.33 are much higher than the local electron temperature. The measured ion temperature decreases with the $Z/A$ to 0.25 and then increases with the charge-to-mass ratio. We ran the Alfv\’en Wave Solar Model-realtime (AWSoM-R) and the SPECTRUM module to validate the ion temperature diagnostic technique and to help interpret the results. We suggest that the widths of hot lines in the coronal hole (e.g., Fe XII, Fe XIII) are also affected by the solar wind bulk motions along the line of sight. We discussed the factors that might affect the line width fitting, including the instrumental width and non-Gaussian wings in some bright SUMER lines that can be fitted by a double-Gaussian or a $\kappa$ distribution. Our study confirms the presence of preferential heating of heavy ions in coronal holes and provides new constraints to coronal heating models.

Read this paper on arXiv…

Y. Zhu, J. Szente and E. Landi
Fri, 23 Sep 22
43/70

Comments: Submitted to ApJ, 26 pages, 18 figures. Jupyter notebooks are available at this https URL Comments are welcome