3D MHD Modeling of Prominence Formation by Plasma Evaporation and Condensation

The formation of prominence material in the solar corona still belongs to the open questions of solar physics. There exists a consensus that prominence plasma has to be of chromospheric origin, but the mechanisms by which it accumulates in the corona are still not well understood. The presently most accepted scenario invokes the evaporation of chromospheric plasma via foot point heating and its subsequent condensation in the corona via thermal instabilities. This scenario has been successfully modeled in 1D hydrodynamic simulations along single field lines of a static magnetic field, but a more appropriate, fully 3D treatment of the thermodynamics in time-dependent magnetic fields was started just very recently by Xia et al. Our group at PSI has recently begun to engage in this challenging task as well, using our time-dependent, fully 3D thermodynamic MHD code MAS. For our investigation we consider two different coronal flux-rope configurations, using the analytical model by Titov and Démoulin and a model in which an elongated flux rope is constructed by photospheric flows. We investigate the plasma behavior for both configurations, using heating models of different complexity, and accompany our analysis by 1D loop simulations performed along selected field lines. In this presentation, we outline our modeling approach and discuss the results obtained so far.