Abstract
A three-dimensional coronal magnetic field is reconstructed for the NOAA active region 11158 on 14 February 2011. A GPU-accelerated direct boundary integral equation (DBIE) method is implemented which is approximately 1000 times faster than the original DBIE used on solar non-linear force-free field modeling. Using the SDO/HMI vector magnetogram as the bottom boundary condition, the reconstructed magnetic field lines are compared with the projected EUV loop structures as observed in the front-view (SDO/AIA) and the side-view (STEREO-A/B) images for the first time; they show very good agreement three-dimensionally. A quantitative comparison with some stereoscopically reconstructed coronal loops shows that the average misalignment angles in our model are at the same order as the state-of-the-art results obtained from reconstructed coronal loops. It is found that the observed coronal loop structures can be grouped into a number of closed and open field structures with some central bright coronal loop features around the polarity inversion line. The reconstructed highly sheared magnetic field lines agree very well with the low-lying sigmoidal filament along the polarity inversion line. This central low-lying magnetic field loop system must have played a key role in powering the flare. It should be noted that while a strand-like coronal feature along the polarity inversion line may be related to the filament, one cannot simply interpret all the coronal bright features along the polarity inversion line as manifestation of the filament without any stereoscopic information.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the referee for the helpful and valuable comments on this paper. Dr. Yingna Su is acknowledged for improving the English of the manuscript and helpful comments. Mr. L.A. Selzer is acknowledged for improving the English of the manuscript as well. We thank the SDO and STEREO team for providing the magnetic field data and EUV images used in this investigation. We also wish to thank Dr. W.T. Thompson for his efficient support in the routine for correcting the STEREO data error. This work is supported by NSFC Grants No. 11221063, 11273030, and 11211120147, MOST Grant No. 2011CB811401, and the National Major Scientific Equipment R&D Project ZDYZ2009-3. Part of experiments were implemented on the ScGrid and GPU cluster of Supercomputing Center, Computer Network Information Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
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Coronal Magnetometry
Guest Editors: S. Tomczyk, J. Zhang, and T.S. Bastian
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Wang, R., Yan, Y. & Tan, B. Three-Dimensional Nonlinear Force-Free Field Reconstruction of Solar Active Region 11158 by Direct Boundary Integral Equation. Sol Phys 288, 507–529 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-013-0422-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-013-0422-5