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Magnetic helicity content in solar wind flux ropes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2008

Sergio Dasso
Sergio Dasso*
Affiliation:
Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio (IAFE), CONICET-UBA and Departamento de Física, FCEN-UBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Magnetic helicity (H) is an ideal magnetohydrodynamical (MHD) invariant that quantifies the twist and linkage of magnetic field lines. In magnetofluids with low resistivity, H decays much less than the energy, and it is almost conserved during times shorter than the global diffusion timescale. The extended solar corona (i.e., the heliosphere) is one of the physical scenarios where H is expected to be conserved. The amount of H injected through the photospheric level can be reorganized in the corona, and finally ejected in flux ropes to the interplanetary medium. Thus, coronal mass ejections can appear as magnetic clouds (MCs), which are huge twisted flux tubes that transport large amounts of H through the solar wind. The content of H depends on the global configuration of the structure, then, one of the main difficulties to estimate it from single spacecraft in situ observations (one point - multiple times) is that a single spacecraft can only observe a linear (one dimensional) cut of the MC global structure. Another serious difficulty is the intrinsic mixing between its spatial shape and its time evolution that occurs during the observation period. However, using some simple assumptions supported by observations, the global shape of some MCs can be unveiled, and the associated H and magnetic fluxes (F) can be estimated. Different methods to quantify H and F from the analysis of in situ observations in MCs are presented in this review. Some of these methods consider a MC in expansion and going through possible magnetic reconnections with its environment. We conclude that H seems to be a ‘robust’ MHD quantity in MCs, in the sense that variations of H for a given MC deduced using different methods, are typically lower than changes of H when a different cloud is considered. Quantification of H and F lets us constrain models of coronal formation and ejection of flux ropes to the interplanetary medium, as well as of the dynamical evolution of MCs in the solar wind.

Keywords

Magnetohydrodynamics (MHD)Sun: solar windSun: solar-terrestrial relationsSun: magnetic fields
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 4 , Symposium S257: Universal Heliophysical Processes , September 2008 , pp. 379 - 389
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2009

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