Coronal Kink Instability With Parallel Thermal Conduction

Thermal conduction along magnetic field lines plays an important role in the evolution of the kink instability in coronal loops. In the nonlinear phase of the instability, local heating occurs due to reconnection, so that the plasma reaches high temperatures. To study the effect of parallel thermal conduction in this process, the 3D nonlinear magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations are solved for an initially unstable equilibrium. The initial state is a cylindrical loop with zero net current. Parallel thermal conduction reduces the local temperature, which leads to temperatures that are an order of magnitude lower than those obtained without thermal conduction. This process is important on the timescale of fast MHD phenomena; it reduces the kinetic energy released by an order of magnitude. The impact of this process on observational signatures is presented. Synthetic observables are generated that include spatial and temporal averaging to account for the resolution and exposure times of TRACE images. It was found that the inclusion of parallel thermal conductivity does not have as large an impact on observables as the order of magnitude reduction in the maximum temperature would suggest. The reason is that response functions sample a broad range of temperatures, so that the net effect of parallel thermal conduction is a blurring of internal features of the loop structure.