Fine structure and flickering of coronal loops: new diagnostics of coronal heating | Edris Tajfirouze

Evidence for some super-hot plasma (> 4 MK) has been found in the core of active region loops. This is a signature of impulsive heating (nano-flaring). We study the EUV light curves in one or a few pixels with a model of multi-stranded coronal loop. Each strand is pulse-heated. In the hypothesis of an energy distribution of the heat pulses, we first generate a grid of strand models with different heating rates, and then we combine them randomly to generate simulated light curves similar to the observed ones. We make 10000 realisations for each set of model parameters (the power law index of the energy distribution, the duration of the heat pulse, the number of strands) and compare them to the observed light curves to find the best one by means of an artificial intelligence system (Probabilistic Neural Network, PNN). Cross-Correlation is used as a cross-check. We find that a shallow (but not flat) distribution of short-duration pulses in a relatively high number of strands (1000) best describes the observed data. A space-resolved loop model with these parameters predicts different fluctuations of the emission from the bottom to the top of the loop: we compare with observation.