SIGNATURES OF IMPULSIVE LOCALIZED HEATING IN THE TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION OF MULTI-STRANDED CORONAL LOOPS

We study the signatures of coronal heating on the differential emission measure (DEM) by means of hydrodynamic simulations capable of resolving the chromospheric-corona transition region sections of multi-stranded coronal loops and following their evolution. We consider heating either uniformly distributed along the loop or localized close to the chromospheric footpoints, in both steady and impulsive regimes. Our simulations show that condensation at the top of the loop forms when the impulsive heating, with a pulse cadence lower than the plasma cooling time, is localized at the loop footpoints, and the pulse energy is below a threshold above which the heating balances the radiative losses, thus preventing the catastrophic cooling which triggers the condensation. A condensation does not produce observable signatures in the DEM because it does not redistribute the plasma over a sufficiently large temperature range. On the other hand, the DEM coronal peak is found sensitive to the pulse cadence time when this is longer or comparable to the plasma cooling time. In this case, the heating pulses produce large oscillations in temperature in the bulk of the coronal plasma, which effectively smears out the coronal DEM structure. The pronounced DEM peak observed in active regions would indicate a predominance of conditions in which the cadence time is shorter or of the order of the plasma cooling time, whilst the structure of the quiet-Sun DEM suggests a cadence time longer than the plasma cooling time. Our simulations give an explanation of the warm overdense and hot underdense loops observed by TRACE, SOHO, and Yohkoh. However, they are unable to reproduce both the transition region and the coronal DEM structure with a unique set of parameters, which outlines the need for a more realistic description of the transition region.