Oral Abstract

Invited talk (I0.2) Rony Keppens (CmPA, KU Leuven)

When hot meets cold: recent progress in solar flare modeling

In the ERC-funded project PROMINENT, we study plasma processes in the solar atmosphere at unprecedented detail, using our open-source MPI-AMRVAC simulation toolkit, where grid-adaptivity is essential to zoom in on details that will be resolved by future observing facilities.

The most violent solar plasma process to study is the solar flare, which represents the most energetic explosion in our heliosphere. It involves a dramatic change - or reconnection - in the magnetic topology of the atmosphere, and the so-called "standard solar flare model" collects all observationally established info on flares in a cartoon. This cartoon emphasizes that macroscopic (magnetohydrodynamic) and microscopic (energetic particles) plasma physical processes dynamically interact, although most - if not all - model efforts only simulate the large or the small scales. I will present our first self-consistent model of a standard solar flare, where electron beam physics dynamically couples to a large-scale, multi-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic evolution of a flaring arcade. Most recently, we continued simulating the hour-long postflare behaviour, to ensure that the hot meets the cold: the first numerical demonstration of postflare coronal rain due to thermal instability!