Non-Local Heat Conduction Effects in Active Region, Flaring and Post-Flare Loops
Abstract
It is, of course, a given that gradients of electron temperature lead to the transport of energy by heat conduction. However, solution of the pertinent electron-transport Fokker-Planck diffusion equation via a Legendre polynomial expansion, or equivalently via a continuous time random walk analysis, shows that in general the heat flux at a particular point in space is determined not just by the temperature gradient at that point, but rather by a convolution of the temperature gradient over a finite region with a kernel that has the form of a bi-exponential function. Somewhat surprisingly, the kernel has a characteristic width equal to several (approximately 7) mean free paths, so that nonlocal effects can be important even in situations where the temperature scale length is quite long compared to the collisional mean free path. We explore the consequences of non-local effects in determining the temperature profiles of static coronal loops and in modelling the transport of thermal energy in flaring and post-flare loops.
- Publication:
-
2018 Triennial Earth-Sun Summit (TESS)
- Pub Date:
- May 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018tess.conf11401E