Coronal Loop Heating by Nearly Incompressible Magnetohydrodynamic Turbulence (NI MHD) and Reduced MHD Models

How is the solar corona heated? Physical models that address the question of heating of the solar corona fall into essentially two classes: Wave/turbulence-driven models and reconnection/loop-opening models. The transport of waves and turbulence beyond the photosphere is central to the coronal heating problem. In 2018, a new model that describes the transport and evolution of turbulence in the quiet solar corona was proposed and applied to a simple 1D model of the corona. This model utilizes the nearly incompressible magnetohydrodynamic (NI MHD) turbulence transport equations to describe the transport of low-frequency turbulence in open magnetic field regions. It describes the evolution of the coupled majority quasi-2D and minority slab component, driven by the magnetic carpet and advected by a subsonic, sub-Alfvenic flow from the lower corona. In this work, we couple the NI MHD turbulence transport model with an MHD model of the solar corona to study the heating problem in a coronal loop. We find that a loop whose initial magnetic field topology consists of a uniform and strong axial guide field without any transverse small scale fields or braiding can be heated to temperatures on the order of 1 million K by transport of turbulence described by the NI MHD turbulence transport model. We compare our coupled MHD/NI MHD model results with results from a reduced MHD (RMHD) model for a benchmark loop setting.