Description
The Sun’s transition region is a narrow layer between the hot and tenuous solar corona and the relatively dense and cool chromosphere. Across the transition region, the plasma temperature can jump by more than two orders of magnitude over a short distance. This creates significant challenges for numerical modelling, particularly in 3D, where the computational expense of including sufficient resolution can be prohibitive. Under-resolving the transition region temperature gradients is known to modify the solar atmospheric response to heating events. For example, it will reduce peak coronal densities and thus have implications for synthesised emission. In response, a variety of numerical fixes have been proposed to better simulate the evaporation of dense plasma following energy release in the corona.
These methods typically work by artificially broadening the transition region and have been implemented in a wide range of solar atmospheric models. Whilst these numerical adaptations have been shown to better reproduce the evolution of coronal plasma, they inevitably change the transfer of wave energy between the chromosphere and the corona. This can have consequences for coronal energy budgets and power spectra. In this talk, I will examine how wave dynamics are modified in single- and multi-dimensional settings. I will explore the impact on well-studied wave energy dissipation methods such as phase mixing and resonant absorption, and discuss the implications for coronal wave modelling.
