Dynamic Formation and Associated Heating of a Magnetic Loop on the Sun. III. A Magnetic Piston and Its Possible Role in Solar Atmospheric Heating

We investigated dynamic interaction between adjacent magnetic loops in the solar atmosphere, which is a process of volume shrinkage with nonuniform acceleration caused by Lorentz force. When these loops locally have different thermal and dynamic properties, a significant discrepancy between their translational motions driven by means of that force may arise, leading to the dynamic interaction. We use both numerical simulation and analytic model of magnetic piston-driven wave to evaluate how much a single event of the interaction contributes to increasing the temperature in the upper chromosphere. The model shows a possibility that a chromospheric plasma is heated by the single event to have transition region temperature, which is typically several tens of times higher than chromospheric temperature. The model also provides an insight into the formation height of the transition region.