The Role of Non-local Thermal Transport in Flare-Driven Chromospheric Evaporation
Abstract
Thermal conduction plays an important role in energy transport during solar flares. Flares heat the solar atmosphere to tens of MK which, combined with mean free paths in excess of 1Mm, can cause the heat flux to become non-local. We use the magnetohydrodynamic Lare2d code to simulate a reconnective heating event with three different thermal conduction models: classical Spitzer-Harm (SH) along the magnetic field, local transport with a heat flux limiter (FL), and the non-local Schurtz, Nicolai, Busquet (SNB) model which is routinely used in laser-plasma codes and has been bench- marked against full Vlasov-Fokker-Planck treatment. The evolution of the atmosphere post heating is compared between simulations using each of these models. Due to a supressed heat flux, SNB gives rise to significantly higher peak temperatures than SH. Further, with SNB transport chromospheric evaporation occurs later and has stronger extreme ultraviolet emission intensity. FL simulations have similar temperature evolution and chromospheric evaporation to SNB, however different values of the flux limiter work best for peak temperature, downflow velocity and EUV emission intensity, and so there is no one optimal value for all cases. We conclude that the SNB model provides a practicable solution to incorporate non-local thermal transport at MHD scales, which will be crucial to improve the realism and accuracy of the next generation of solar flare simulations.
Related
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- Beam-driven Evaporation in 2.5D Flare Simulations with an Asymmetric Magnetic Field Configuration
BibTeX
@misc{parmenter2026role,
title = {{The Role of Non-local Thermal Transport in Flare-Driven Chromospheric Evaporation}},
author = {Thomas Parmenter and Tony Arber and Sergey Belov and Tom Goffrey},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.24723},
eprint = {2609.24723},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24723},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - The Role of Non-local Thermal Transport in Flare-Driven Chromospheric Evaporation
AU - Thomas Parmenter
AU - Tony Arber
AU - Sergey Belov
AU - Tom Goffrey
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.24723
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.24723
AB - Thermal conduction plays an important role in energy transport during solar flares. Flares heat the solar atmosphere to tens of MK which, combined with mean free paths in excess of 1Mm, can cause the heat flux to become non-local. We use the magnetohydrodynamic Lare2d code to simulate a reconnective heating event with three different thermal conduction models: classical Spitzer-Harm (SH) along the magnetic field, local transport with a heat flux limiter (FL), and the non-local Schurtz, Nicolai, Busquet (SNB) model which is routinely used in laser-plasma codes and has been bench- marked against full Vlasov-Fokker-Planck treatment. The evolution of the atmosphere post heating is compared between simulations using each of these models. Due to a supressed heat flux, SNB gives rise to significantly higher peak temperatures than SH. Further, with SNB transport chromospheric evaporation occurs later and has stronger extreme ultraviolet emission intensity. FL simulations have similar temperature evolution and chromospheric evaporation to SNB, however different values of the flux limiter work best for peak temperature, downflow velocity and EUV emission intensity, and so there is no one optimal value for all cases. We conclude that the SNB model provides a practicable solution to incorporate non-local thermal transport at MHD scales, which will be crucial to improve the realism and accuracy of the next generation of solar flare simulations.
ER -