Optimal initial perturbations for current sheet simulations
Date:
Poster presentation at the KU Leuven Physics Research Day, Leuven, Belgium.
Abstract. Magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations are an important tool to model the plasma structures observed in the solar atmosphere. When starting from an equilibrium, simulations are usually initialised with an initial perturbation of the magnetic field or fluid velocity. In the former case, this is an analytic expression satisfying div(B) = 0, whereas in the latter case a common choice is simply random noise. Though both methods generally work well, it raises a few questions: does the initial perturbation affect the evolution? What if we perturb the system with one (or a superposition) of its natural oscillations (i.e. linear eigenmodes)? What is the effect in the presence of competing instabilities, e.g. in solar current sheets?