Magnetofrictional Extrapolations of Low and Lou’s Force-Free Equilibria

Abstract

We present a careful investigation of the magnetofrictional relaxation and extrapolation technique applied to the reconstruction of two test fields. These fields are taken from the family of nonlinear force-free magnetic equilibria constructed by Low and Lou (Astrophys. J. 352, 343, 1990), which have emerged as standard tests for extrapolation techniques in recent years. For the practically relevant case that only the field values in the bottom plane of the considered volume (vector magnetogram) are used as input information (i.e., not including the knowledge about the test field at the side and top boundaries), the test field is reconstructed to a higher accuracy than obtained previously. Detailed diagnostics of the reconstruction accuracy show that the implementation of fourth-order spatial discretization was essential to reach this accuracy for the given test fields and to achieve near machine precision in satisfying the solenoidal condition. Different variants of boundary conditions are tested, which all yield comparable accuracy. In its present implementation, the technique yields a scaling of computing time with total number of grid points only slightly below N ^5/3, which is too steep for applications to large (≥1024²) magnetograms, except on supercomputers. Directions for improvement are outlined.