Visualization of resonant absorption in solar coronal loops by simulation of soft x-ray images

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Abstract
One of the proposed mechanisms to explain the heating of the solar corona is resonant absorption of magnetic Alfvén waves. Numerical studies of this mechanism often involve large scale computations and produce large amounts of data that need to be visualized. In this article we present a method to visualize numerically calculated density and temperature evolutions of heating calculations by simulating the soft x‐ray observations of the soft x‐ray telescope aboard the Yohkoh satellite. The visualization method is applied to two different model calculations of the heating of coronal magnetic loops by the resonant absorption of Alfvén waves. For these two cases, information on the variations of temperature and density can be extracted conveniently from the generated images. The resulting images reveal features that are characteristic of the resonant absorption process. This suggests that signatures of resonant absorption can be extracted from real soft x‐ray observations of coronal loops. By varying the parameters of the models and visualizing the results the effects of the parameters on the simulated soft x‐ray images will become known. In turn, this information can be used to identify the heating mechanism in real observations. © 1996 American Institute of Physics.