Observations of photospheric magnetic structure below a dark filament using the Hinode Spectro-Polarimeter

The structure of the photospheric vector magnetic field below a dark filament on the Sun is studied using the observations of the Spectro-Polarimeter attached to the Solar Optical Telescope onboard Hinode. Special attention is paid to discriminating between two suggested models, a flux rope or a bent arcade. “Inverse polarity” orientation is possible below the filament in a flux rope, whereas “normal polarity” can appear in both models. We study a filament in the active region NOAA 10930, which appeared on the solar disk during 2006 December. The transverse field perpendicular to the line of sight has a direction almost parallel to the filament spine with a shear angle of 30°, the orientation of which includes the 180° ambiguity. To know whether it is in the normal orientation or in the inverse one, the center-to-limb variation is used for the solution under the assumption that the filament does not drastically change its magnetic structure during the passage. When the filament is near the east limb, we found that the line-of-site magnetic component below the filament is positive, while it is negative near the west limb.This change of sign indicates that the horizontal photospheric field perpendicular to the polarity inversion line beneath the filament has an “inverse-polarity”, which indicates a flux-rope structure of the filament supporting field.

MHD Simulation of Dark Filament Eruption in the Quadrupole Source Model

A magnetohydrodynamic simulation in a 2.5D approximation is performed for the quadrupole source model for arcade flares treated years ago by Uchida (1980), and recently supported by the observations from Yohkoh. It is shown that this model can explain several key characteristic features of arcade flares found by Yohkoh, and can avoid some of the paradoxes existing in the “classical model”.