Energy dissipation in coronal loops: statistical analysis of Intermittent structures in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence

MORALES, LAURA; DMITRUK, PABLO ; GOMEZ, D.O.

San Francisco

Conferencia; Fall Meeting - American Geophysical Union; 2015

American Geophysical Union

Over the last years the fact that the flaring corona power law can be thought to be in a turbulent state or in a state of self organized criticality have produced a great amount of research.Nevertheless only a few observational papers investigated this fact and have not found conclusive results. In this work we numericaly integrate the reduced magnetohydrodynamic equations to simulate the dynamics of coronal loops driven at their bases by footpoint motions.  These  simulations show that a stationary turbulent regime is reached after a few photospheric times, displaying abroadband power spectrum and a dissipation rate consistent with the energy loss rates of the plasma confined in these loops.We analyzed these results using statistical methods typical of the self-organized criticality (SOC) paradigm. The energy, area and lifetime statistics of the structures detected in this simulated data presentrobust scaling laws. We compute the critical exponents linking geometrical properties to the underlying avalanche dynamics.We also calculate the spreading exponents of the intermittent structures and investigate if thethe spreading dynamics obeys scaling relations which relate the spreading and avalanche exponents in order to test it consitency as predicted for a self organized critical system.