Global Solar Free Magnetic Energy and Electric Current Density Distribution of Carrington Rotation 2124

Abstract

Solar eruptive phenomena, like flares and coronal mass ejections(CMEs) are governed by magnetic fields. To describe the structure of these phenomena one needs information on the magnetic flux density and the electric current density vector components in three dimensions throughout the atmosphere. However, current spectro-polarimetric measurements typically limit the determination of the vector magnetic field only to the photosphere. Therefore, there is considerable interest in accurate modeling of the solar coronal magnetic field using photospheric vector magnetograms as boundary data. In this work, we model the coronal magnetic field for global solar atmosphere using a nonlinear force-free field(NLFFF) extrapolation codes implemented to a synoptic maps of photospheric vector magnetic field synthesized from Vector Spectromagnetograph (VSM) on Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS) as boundary condition. Using the resulting three dimensional magnetic field, we calculate the three dimensional electric current density and free magnetic energy throughout the solar atmosphere for Carrington rotation 2124. We found that spatially, the low-lying, current-carrying core field demonstrates strong concentration of free energy in the AR core, from the photosphere to the lower corona; the coronal field becomes slightly more sheared in the lowest layer and it relaxes to the potential field configuration with height. The free energy density appears largely co-spatial with the electric current distribution.