Research Project
Solar flares occur when a large amount of energy is converted into X-rays, heat and supersonic fluid motion. Prior to the flare this energy is stored in a magnetic field filling the atmosphere above sunspots and related features called active regions. The energy is released suddenly when an electric field changes the connectivity of several coronal magnetic field lines. A single change of this kind permits the newly configured magnetic field line to retract rapidly, releasing energy exactly as would a rubber band under tension.
This summer I worked with John on a code called PREFT in IDL, which was created by Dana, and it stands for Post-Reconnection Evolution of a Flux Tube, it pretty much says what it is. It looks at the evolution of a flux tube after reconnection. I used this code to look at a combination of different flux tube. Most of the parameters of these flux tubes were the same, the only parameters that I’d been changing were flatl and tmax. Flatl is the distance, from the left end of the tube, that the chamber starts and tmax is the maximum temperature of the tube at the beginning of the run. I then placed six different shaped chambers onto the left end of the flux tubes to see what effect changing tmax and flatl and the shape of the chambers had. The effects I looked at were the total coronal mass and rate of change of mass in the left and right half of the corona as well as the full corona, the velocity and acceleration of the left and right evaporation fronts and the position where the two evaporation fronts collide.