Heating Energy Requirement

We start to analyze the coronal heating problem by inquiring rst about the energy requirements. A coronal heating source EH has to balance at least the two major loss terms of radiative loss ER and thermal conduction EC , as we specied in the energy equation (3.6.2) for a hydrostatic corona, EH (x) ER (x) EC (x) = 0 , (9.1.1) where each of the terms represents an energy rate per volume and time unit (erg cm3 s1 ), and depends on the spatial location x. Because the corona is very inhomoge- neous, the heating requirement varies by several orders of magnitude depending on the location. Because of the highly organized structuring by the magnetic eld (due to the low plasma- parameter in the corona), neighboring structures are fully isolated and can have large gradients in the heating rate requirement, while eld-aligned conduc- tion will smooth out temperature differences so that an energy balance is warranted along magnetic eld lines. We can therefore specify the heating requirement for each magnetically isolated structure separately (e.g., a loop or an open uxtube in a coronal hole), and consider only the eld-aligned space coordinate s in each energy equation, as we did for the energy equation (3.6.2) of a single loop, EH (s) ER (s) EC (s) = 0 . (9.1.2) Parameterizing the dependence of the heating rate on the space coordinate s with an exponential function (Eq. 3.7.2) (i.e., with a base heating rate EH 0 and heating scale length sH ), we derived scaling laws for coronal loops in hydrostatic energy balance, which are known as RTV laws for the special case of uniform heating without gravity (Eqs. 3.6.14 15), and have been generalized by Serio et al. (1981) for nonuniform heating and gravity (Eqs. 3.6.1617). It is instructional to express the RTV law as a function of the loop density ne and loop half