Three-dimensional Reconstruction of Coronal Plasma Properties from a Single Perspective

Abstract

Abstract Much of our understanding of the state of coronal plasmas comes from observations that are optically thin. This means that light travels freely through the corona without being materially affected by it, which allows it to be easily seen through, but also results in a line-of-sight degeneracy that has previously thwarted attempts to recover the three-dimensional structure of the coronal plasma. However, although the corona is disorganized in the line-of-sight direction, it is highly organized in the field-aligned direction. This paper demonstrates how to exploit this organization to resolve the line-of-sight degeneracy in the plasma properties using a suitable magnetic field structure. This allows, for the first time, the two-dimensional optically thin plasma observations to directly drive the three-dimensional plasma reconstruction throughout an entire active region (or larger). A preliminary investigation with a potential field is shown, finding a solution which clearly resembles the real solar data, even with a single perspective. The results indicate that there is ample information in the resulting residuals that can be used to refine the magnetic field structure, suggesting that these residuals can in turn be used to directly constrain the magnetic field extrapolations used in the reconstruction. The paper concludes with a discussion of how these residuals can in turn be used to directly drive the magnetic field extrapolations.