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Abstract
Zipper reconnection has been proposed as a mechanism for creating most of the twist in the flux tubes that are present prior to eruptive flares and coronal mass ejections. We have conducted a first numerical experiment on this new regime of reconnection, where two initially untwisted parallel flux tubes are sheared and reconnected to form a large flux rope. We describe the properties of this experiment, including the linkage of magnetic flux between concentrated flux sources at the base of the simulation, the twist of the newly formed flux rope, and the conversion of mutual magnetic helicity in the sheared pre-reconnection state into the self-helicity of the newly formed flux rope.
Highlights
Eruptive solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) contain large highly twisted magnetic flux ropes, and a key question is how the twist is created, since the twist in the preeruptive state is much smaller than what is observed later in the solar wind in an interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) or magnetic cloud (MC) (Webb, 2000; Démoulin, 2008; Vourlidas, 2014).Prior to the onset of an eruption, the magnetic structure around a prominence is highly sheared and slowly evolves through a series of equilibria
Our investigation will study the flux rope formation process itself, rather than the eruption onset either due to a loss of equilibrium (Priest and Forbes, 1990; Lin and Forbes, 2000) or an equilibrium instability (e.g. Priest and Forbes, 2000; Priest, 2014) often attributed to either the kink instability (Hood and Priest, 1979; Fan and Gibson, 2003; Török, Kliem, and Titov, 2004) or the torus instability (Török and Kliem, 2005; Kliem and Török, 2006), which controls most of the dynamic and explosive behaviour witnessed during a flare or CME
Wang et al (2017) combine solar and interplanetary observational data to give a detailed overview of the dynamic formation of a single magnetic flux rope in the solar corona during a tworibbon flare
Summary
Eruptive solar flares and coronal mass ejections (CMEs) contain large highly twisted magnetic flux ropes, and a key question is how the twist is created, since the twist in the preeruptive state is much smaller than what is observed later in the solar wind in an interplanetary coronal mass ejection (ICME) or magnetic cloud (MC) (Webb, 2000; Démoulin, 2008; Vourlidas, 2014). Zipper reconnection explains the initial motion of flare brightenings parallel to the PIL It builds up magnetic twist and flux in the core of the erupting flux rope during the rise phase. Page 3 of 17 98 ropes under a coronal arcade to form a sigmoid, whereas zipper reconnection refers to the reconnection of a series of loops placed along and inclined to the polarity inversion line and is a response to the eruption In light of such models, several recent papers are relevant to our work. Wang et al (2017) combine solar and interplanetary observational data to give a detailed overview of the dynamic formation of a single magnetic flux rope in the solar corona during a tworibbon flare These authors derive estimates for how the poloidal and toroidal flux and the field line twist evolve over time.
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