Turbulence and Its Potential Impact on Solar Chromospheric and Coronal Heating

Abstract Low-frequency turbulence in the solar chromosphere remains poorly understood. We address (1) the sources of low-frequency turbulence that potentially heat the chromosphere, and (2) how turbulence is transported and dissipated throughout the chromosphere and lower corona. We use particle-in-cell simulations to investigate mixed polarity magnetic fields corresponding to emergent magnetic carpet field in coronal holes or quiet Sun regions for strong (imbalanced) and weak (balanced) guide magnetic fields. The initial mixed polarity magnetic field transitions rapidly to a turbulent state dominated by advected small-scale nonlinear structures, with a minority slab turbulence population, and the emergent field is largely annihilated. Turbulence is anisotropic for an imbalanced magnetic field and more isotropic for balanced cases. We develop a transport model for turbulence advected and dissipated throughout the chromosphere by randomly distributed energy-containing scale dynamical flows described by log-normal statistics. We compute the expectations for the total energy per unit volume 〈 y 〉( h ) J m −3 , the Elsässer specific energy 〈 〈 Z ∞ 2 〉 〉 ( h ) m 2 s −2 , the heating rate 〈 H ̇ 〉 ( h ) J m −3 s −1 , and the correlation length 〈 λ 〉( h ) in kilometers as functions of height h above the photosphere. Turbulent energy is injected into the low corona by a random “patchwork” of sites across the transition region surface. The expected energy injection rates 〈 S ̇ 〉 J m −2 s −1 for the chromosphere and at the base of the corona exceed the estimated energy requirements needed to heat both the chromosphere and corona. Similarly, we show that spicules can be heated gradually with increasing height by entrained magnetic carpet and photospheric turbulence.