- Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC, United States
Space weather models endeavoring to connect remote observations to in-situ measurements at various locations in the heliosphere invariably require a coronal model to connect the photosphere magnetically to the inner heliosphere. The most famous and popular implementation of this connection is a potential field source surface (PFSS) model out to the source surface, typically located at 2.5 solar radii, combined with a Schatten current sheet (SCS) model. While the PFSS model is mostly understood, the SCS has been utilized in heliospheric physics for nearly 50 years with little understanding of it’s physical and mathematical underpinnings. In this overview article, I lay out the mathematical formalism of the SCS, describe how it differs from the PFSS, and summarize several techniques used to combine the PFSS and SCS to create a global coronal model from the photosphere to the inner heliosphere.
1 Background
The ultimate goal of heliospheric modeling is rapid and reliable space weather forecasting at 1 AU for operational capabilities. Such models require a number of inputs from the surface as initial or boundary conditions which are then propagated from the Sun to Earth via a combination of empirical or magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) models. A major challenge for space weather forecasting models is the lack of remote measurements of the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere, above the photosphere. Although there are a number of obstacles to such measurements, recent advances in radio astronomy have started to enable magnetic field measurements in the solar corona (Alissandrakis and Gary, 2021). Nevertheless, there are still no global measurements of the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere, necessitating the development of approximate models for the three dimensional structure of the Sun’s magnetic field.
The three most common models of the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere are the potential field source surface (PFSS; Altschuler and Newkirk, 1969) model, the linear force free magnetic field (LFF; Nakagawa, 1973; Levine and Altschuler, 1974), the nonlinear force free magnetic field (NLFF; Wiegelmann, 2007) model, which are summarized nicely in Mackay and Yeates (2012). Another approach that avoids many of the flawed assumptions in the first three techniques is the non force-free field (NFFF; Hu and Dasgupta, 2006) model. By themselves, all of these models suffer from a lack of sufficient constraints: while the photospheric magnetic field is well observed, and can be used as a boundary condition to calculate the solution to each model, global models still require an outer boundary condition to fully constrain the problem numerically. In PFSS models, the outer boundary condition is assumed to be a perfectly radial magnetic field at a location called the “source surface.” Although there are good theoretical reasons to assume the existence of such a surface, early eclipse observations (Schatten, 1971) and MHD (Pneuman and Kopp, 1971) models indicated that polar plumes tended to bend more equator-ward than was predicted by the PFSS model, while the bending of streamers should, contrary to the results of the PFSS extrapolation, depend on the amplitude of the solar cycle (Mackay and Yeates, 2012). Furthermore, Ulysses observations initially supported the view that the magnetic field was essentially uniform in latitude (Wang and Sheeley, 1990). These considerations prompted the development of the Schatten et al. (1969) model, which we will call the SCS, in which the magnetic field outside the source surface produced by the PFSS was replaced with a similar current free magnetic field into which currents are introduced, essentially, by hand. A subsequent addition to this model attempted to minimize the magnitude of extraneous currents introduced by this process (Schatten, 1971).
Although the SCS is used ubiquitously in the literature, and indeed forms the basis of present-day operational space weather modeling, there is a paucity in the literature of its mathematical formalism. Much of the formalism has been derived previously (Altschuler and Newkirk, 1969; Schatten et al., 1969; Schatten, 1971; Wang and Sheeley, 1992; Zhao and Hoeksema, 1994; Nikolić, 2017; Reiss et al., 2019; Narechania et al., 2021; Song, 2023; Knizhnik et al., 2024a), but different parts of the mathematical basis for the SCS are scattered among these various sources. Curiously, many authors use the SCS model but do not describe its implementation, making those references insufficiently descriptive for scientists to implement the technique from scratch, and the actual equations for the SCS are given, to my knowledge, only in Nikolić (2017) and Knizhnik et al. (2024a). The literature is replete with papers that state that the SCS has been implemented, but do not fully describe it, or do not fully describe whether, how, or if any techniques have been employed to minimize extraneous currents in the region outside the source surface. This review article, therefore, endeavors to derive the mathematical formalism of the SCS by showing how it is an extension of the PFSS model, and lay out the current-minimizing methods described by Schatten (1971) as well as the interface region approach introduced by McGregor et al. (2008). Finally, we describe the process for obtaining the heliospheric current sheet from the SCS model, and we comment on the preferred approach to implementing the SCS.
2 Mathematical formalism
2.1 Potential magnetic field inside a spherical shell
The mathematical formalism of the SCS is closely linked with that of the PFSS. As a result, we will start the derivation of the SCS by deriving the expressions for the magnetic field inside a spherical shell, since at the heart of both the PFSS and SCS magnetic field models is that they are solutions of a Laplace equation in such a shell, bounded from below by a spherical surface magnetic field distribution. In the case of the PFSS, the magnetic field is prescribed between the spherical surface at
and potential
The solution of Equation 2.2 is identically
and using Equation 2.1,
whose general solution in spherical coordinates is given by (Jackson, 1998):
The
where
where
This is the general form of a potential, solenoidal field
2.2 The potential field source surface model
2.2.1 Boundary conditions
In the PFSS model (Altschuler and Newkirk, 1969), the boundary conditions are specified at some inner radius
This boundary condition applies to
The boundary condition at
2.2.2 The PFSS solution
From Equation 2.4, Equation 2.10 means that
Thus, the general solution for the radial magnetic field component in the region
The coefficients
so that
The Kroenecker
Therefore:
where
Combining Equation 2.11, Equation 2.12, and Equation 2.13, the radial magnetic field in the volume is therefore:
where
Similarly, following Wang and Sheeley (1992) and defining
The other two components of the magnetic field become, from Equation 2.7 and Equation 2.8:
A key feature of the PFSS solution is that at
and
In other words, the magnetic field determined from the PFSS solution is purely radial at
In terms of the Legendre Polynomials, the solution of the PFSS can be written as (Nikolić, 2017; 2019):
where
and
and
2.3 The Schatten model
2.3.1 Boundary conditions
In the SCS model (Schatten, 1971), the boundary conditions are specified at the inner radius
and the Dirichlet condition
There are two crucial features of Equation 2.20. First, the absolute value sign ensures that all of the field is pointing outward from
Second, the Neumann boundary condition at
2.3.2 The SCS solution
Combining Equation 2.21 and the general expression for the three magnetic field components given in Equation 2.6, Equation 2.7, Equation 2.8 we obtain that
since keeping terms that go like
Orthogonality of the spherical harmonics allows us to determine the expansion coefficients
The orthonormality of the spherical harmonics in Equation 2.5 yields:
All contributions to the double sums vanish due to the Kroenecker
If we define
Then
Plugging this into Equation 2.22, Equation 2.23, Equation 2.24, the magnetic field components outside
where
and
In terms of the Schmidt-Legendre functions, the SCS can be written as (Nikolić, 2019):
where
and
There are three important features of Equation 2.25, Equation 2.26, Equation 2.27. First, since the SCS is effectively just another calculation of the PFSS solution where the outer boundary is at
and
in stark contrast to Equation 2.18, Equation 2.19. Mathematically, this discontinuity results from using a Dirichlet boundary condition at
3 Dealing with the pfss-scs discontinuity
One approach to deal with the discontinuity is simply to assume that its effects are small or negligible, which is the assumption underlying the heliospheric modeling in Knizhnik et al. (2024a). However, Zhao and Hoeksema (1994) showed that this unphysical kinking of the field at
To mitigate this issue, two approaches have been proposed.
3.1 Schatten’s minimization
In the approach originally proposed by Schatten (1971) and implemented by, e.g., Zhao and Hoeksema (1994) and Reiss et al. (2019), the sum of squared residuals between the PFSS solution at
This is derived by Schatten (1971), Zhao and Hoeksema (1994) and Reiss et al. (2019) as follows. The quantity to be minimized can be written as
where
where
and,
The minimization can then be performed by differentiating
This can be written down as
The sum over
where
and similarly
Such that b is a vector of length
If working with the more common Legendre polynomial formulation, Equation 2.30, Equation 2.31, Equation 2.32, the minimization has been derived by several authors: (Schatten, 1971; Zhao and Hoeksema, 1994; Reiss et al., 2019; Nikolić, 2017). The most thorough derivation is by Nikolić (2017), who writes down the vector of expansion coefficients
In terms of the vector
Here the notation
with these definitions, the solution that minimizes the sum of squared residuals (Equation 2.57) in the region
3.1.1 Weakness of the minimization approach
The problem with the approach described in Section 2.4 is that in attempting to minimize the magnitude of the current sheet created at
3.2 The interface region
A second approach, developed by McGregor et al. (2008) and Meadors et al. (2020), and curently implemented in the EUHFORIA code Pomoell and Poedts (2018), is to compute the PFSS solution as described above, but use the radial magnetic field at a radius
4 Reversing the polarities
Equation 2.20 used the absolute value of the radial magnetic field at
After the expansion coefficients are calculated as described above, either by directly implementing the expansion in spherical harmonics at
In practice, this brute force technique is unavoidable, but it also becomes computationally intensive when a large number of target points are required. For example, if the sign of the field is needed on some surface to be used as input to an MHD model (e.g., Reiss et al., 2019; Knizhnik et al., 2024a), a field line needs to be traced from each grid location on that surface. Even more computationally intensive is a scenario when the magnitude and polarity of the magnetic field needs to be known in the entire volume, requiring field line tracing from every single grid point in the volume (e.g., Scott et al., 2018).
The end result of the polarity reversal is that the boundary condition on the SCS region implicitly matches the PFSS solution at
It should be noted that the Lorentz force
and the associated magnetic stresses remain constant before and after the polarity reversal, since the Maxwell stress tensor
Is quadratic in magnetic field components, so changing the sign of all components of the magnetic field leaves
5 Discussion
The SCS model is a key component for many coronal and heliospheric models. It connects the PFSS regime to the inner heliosphere, and is used as input for MHD and WSA heliospheric models. Unfortunately, the mathematical formalism, reasoning, and physical motivation behind the use of the SCS model is very difficult to find in the literature. This article has endeavored to describe the SCS completely. The SCS has several important properties.
First, it smooths out the magnetic field in the inner heliosphere from an initially complicated and salt-and-pepper photospheric distribution and a slightly smoother, yet still complex magnetic field on the source surface, to an essentially bipolar magnetic field in the inner heliosphere. At large radii, the SCS magnetic field has essentially constant magnitude as a function of both longitude and latitude, and creates a well defined, smooth heliospheric current sheet separating positive and negative polarities.
Second, it shows better agreement with observations of solar plumes and streamers by bending magnetic field lines toward the equator outside of the source surface, in direct contrast to the PFSS model, which assumes perfectly radial magnetic field outside the source surface (Schatten, 1971; Zhao and Hoeksema, 1994).
Third, it is analytically tractable, conserves the solenoidality of the magnetic field (at least when not employing the minimization techniques of Section 2.4), and is relatively simple to compute. The most computationally intensive step is the field line tracing, which for reasonable model resolutions only takes up to several hours on a single CPU.
Nevertheless, the model has significant downsides. First, there is no theoretical reason to believe that the magnetic field in the solar atmosphere is divided into 1) a current free region below
A further issue with the SCS model is the approach often employed to minimize the current sheet at
Finally, the view that the interplanetary magnetic field was essentially uniform with heliospheric latitude, as indicated by early Ulysses observations, and which is meant to be reproduced by the SCS model, has been shown to be on poor observational footing. Later Ulysses measurements show significant variability in the interplanetary magnetic field (e.g., Khabarova and Obridko, 2012; Khabarova, 2013; Erdős and Balogh, 2014), as well as in the solar wind velocity and density (McComas et al., 2008; Khabarova et al., 2018). Although significant variation in the velocity and density is seen with the WSA model due to its reliance on the expansion factor and distance from the nearest coronal hole boundary, the magnetic variations seen by Ulysses are not reproduced by the SCS model, which typically creates a bipolar magnetic field outside
Author contributions
KK: Writing–original draft, Writing–review and editing.
Funding
The author(s) declare that financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was sponsored by the Office of Naval Research 6.1 program.
Acknowledgments
KK acknowledges helpful discussions with Micah Weberg, Samantha Wallace, Mark Linton, Ajeet Zaveri, Roger Scott, Yi-Ming Wang. This article is dedicated to those who lost their freedoms to government tyranny between 2020 and 2022. KK is grateful to the referee for providing insightful feedback that improved the scope of the paper.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Footnotes
1As will be described below, this is often not how the SCS is implemented (McGregor et al., 2008).
2There is a typo in Equations C13-C14 of Knizhnik et al. (2024a) in the expression for
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Keywords: heliosphere, magnetic fields, solar corona, electric current, Magnetohydrodynamics
Citation: Knizhnik KJ (2024) The Schatten current sheet. Front. Astron. Space Sci. 11:1476498. doi: 10.3389/fspas.2024.1476498
Received: 05 August 2024; Accepted: 26 September 2024;
Published: 29 October 2024.
Edited by:
Olga V. Khabarova, Tel Aviv University, IsraelReviewed by:
Roman Kislov, Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism Ionosphere and Radio Wave Propagation (RAS), RussiaCopyright © 2024 Knizhnik. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Kalman J. Knizhnik, a2FsbWFuLmoua25pemhuaWsuY2l2QHVzLm5hdnkubWls