event
Monday 04 Dec 2017: Mixing by the MHD Kelvin-Helmholtz instability and its applications in the solar atmosphere
Dr Andrew Hillier - University of Exeter
H103 14:30-16:30
Recent observations of prominence threads in the solar atmosphere appear to show heating of the cool prominence material by showing it disappears from cool spectral lines, and appears in warm ones, with the nonlinear stage of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability being invoked as a key physical process to drive the energy dissipation behind this heating. However, the prominence threads observed are composed of cool material embedded in a hot corona, so the mixing effects by the instability are likely to drive the creation of a warm region around the prominence material without the need for any heating processes. In this talk I will present some initial results in my attempt to determine the importance of the mixing versus the heating through the development of nonlinear solutions to determine the velocity, magnitude of the turbulence and the temperature of the mixing region. These will then be applied to the prominence situation to infer about the expected heating.
