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Sergey A. Belov

Publications and source records attributed to Sergey A. Belov.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

The Study of Quasi-Periodic Pulsations in Solar and Stellar Flares with SKA

An intensively studied phenomenon which is not described by the standard flare model are quasi-periodic pulsations (QPP) of the flaring emission. As analysis of the QPP phenomenon intrinsically requires a combination of high time and spatial resolutions, especially in the radio band, the unprecedented capabilities of SKA offer us a unique opportunity to reach a breakthrough progress in the observational study of QPP. The SKA-Mid-frequency band falls in a unique window where both coherent emissions from particle acceleration sites and incoherent gyrosynchrotron emissions from non-thermal particles in coronal loops can be studied. With an additional polarisation dimension and the capability to perform wideband spectroscopic imaging, the QPPs in gyrosynchrotron emission ($\ge 1$~GHz) and plasma emission will help understand the local magnetic field modulation due to active phenomena and the response seen in the particle acceleration observable below ~600~MHz. An incomplete list of specific science questions to be addressed with SKA includes (a) the role of QPP in the energy partition in flares, (b) seismology of flaring sites by QPP of different classes, (c ) differences and similarities between QPP in solar and stellar flares, (d) advancing the standard flare model, (e) the physics of repetitive magnetic reconnection: spontaneous vs induced, (f) ML techniques in the detection, classification and analysis of QPP, (g) QPP in weak flares. The latter topic could be especially advanced with SKA which will allow for high-cadence high fidelity radio imaging of weak energy release events.

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Time-domain anomalies in solar and stellar flares

The temporal morphology of flare light curves encodes the underlying flare physics, and deviations from the typical flare profile may indicate the presence of mechanisms not captured by a standard flare model. To search for such time-domain deviations from a "standard" flare, we develop an unsupervised Deep Support Vector Data Description (Deep SVDD) model, which learns a compact representation of normal flares, against which unseen anomalous flares are identified. The model is trained on synthetic light curves with a "normal" flare morphology, generated from existing analytical flare trend models with noise. Using the distribution of normal flare data, we introduce a probabilistic Flare Anomaly Index (FLAI) which allows for separating flare light curves into three distinct classes: normal data (ND), weak anomalies (WA), and strong anomalies (SA). Application of FLAI to the Kepler flare catalogue (white light) reveals that 36% and 30% of events belong to the WA and SA classes, respectively. For M- and X-class solar flares from the STIX flare list, 25% and 32% of events in the 15-25 keV channel are classified as WA and SA, respectively, versus 15% for both WA and SA classes in the 4-10 keV channel. Thus, anomalous flares appear more frequently in the STIX high-energy channel. These results show that both solar and stellar flares often deviate from the normal flare population used for model training, suggesting departures from the standard flare scenario, such as modified energy release and dissipation, or the development of wave and oscillatory processes in flare sites.

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Detection of kink oscillations in solar coronal loops by a CNN-LSTM neural network

A hybrid machine learning model which combines a shallow convolutional neural network and a long short-term memory network (CNN--LSTM), has been developed to automate the detection of kink oscillations in coronal plasma loops within large volumes of high-cadence sequences of imaging data. The network was trained on a set of 10,000 synthetic data cubes designed to mimic sequences of coronal images, achieving an accuracy greater than 98\% on this synthetic dataset. The model was then applied to detect kink oscillations in real data cubes of coronal active regions observed with SDO/AIA in the 171~Å channel. This dataset consisted of 50 samples with visually detected kink oscillations and 128 samples without. Each sample covered an area of 260$\times$260~pixels in the spatial domain and a duration of 30~min with a 12~s cadence in the time domain. Both off-limb and on-disk regions of interest were used. The data were pre-processed by median filtering in the time domain, and Gaussian smoothing and Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization in the spatial domain. In the real dataset, the performance of the model was 83.7\%.The model is fully available in open access. We regard the CNN--LSTM model developed as a first step toward creating robust tools for routine solar coronal data mining in the context of coronal oscillation study.

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Solar Flare Ion Temperatures

This paper proposes that the ion temperature is several times the local electron temperature in the hot onset phase and at the above-the-loop region of solar flares. The paper considers: the evidence of spectral line Doppler widths ("non-thermal" broadening); evidence for "universal" ion and electron temperature increase scaling relations for magnetic reconnection in the solar wind, Earth's magnetopause, Earth's magnetotail and numerical simulations; and thermal equilibration times for onset and above-the-loop densities, which are much longer than previous estimates based on soft X-ray flare loops. We conclude that the ion temperature is likely to reach 60 MK or greater and that it may represent a substantial part of spectral line widths, significantly contributing to solving the long-standing issue of the excess nonthermal broadening in flare lines.

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Detecting quasi-periodic pulsations in solar and stellar flares with a neural network

Quasi-periodic pulsations (QPP) are often detected in solar and stellar flare lightcurves. These events may contain valuable information about the underlying fundamental plasma dynamics as they are not described by the standard flare model. The detection of QPP signals in flare lightcurves is hindered by their intrinsically non-stationary nature, contamination by noise, and the continuously increasing amount of flare observations. Hence, the creation of automated techniques for QPP detection is imperative. We implemented the Fully Convolution Network (FCN) architecture to classify the flare lightcurves whether they have exponentially decaying harmonic QPP or not. To train the FCN, 90,000 synthetic flare lightcurves with and without QPP were generated. After training, it showed an accuracy of 87.2% on the synthetic test data and did not experience overfitting. To test the FCN performance on real data, we used the subset of stellar flare lightcurves observed by Kepler, with strong evidence of decaying QPP identified hitherto with other methods. Then, the FCN was applied to find QPPs in a larger-scale Kepler flare catalogue comprised of 2274 events, resulting in a 7% QPP detection rate with a probability above 95%. The FCN, implemented in Python, is accessible through a browser application with a user-friendly graphical interface and detailed installation and usage guide. The obtained results demonstrate that the developed FCN performs well and successfully detects exponentially decaying harmonic QPP in real flare data, and can be used as a tool for preliminary sifting of the QPP events of this type in future large-scale observational surveys.

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Exact solution to the problem of slow oscillations in coronal loops and its diagnostic applications

Magnetoacoustic oscillations are nowadays routinely observed in various regions of the solar corona. This allows them to be used as means of diagnosing plasma parameters and processes occurring in it. Plasma diagnostics, in turn, requires a sufficiently reliable MHD model to describe the wave evolution. In our paper, we focus on obtaining the exact analytical solution to the problem of the linear evolution of standing slow magnetoacoustic (MA) waves in coronal loops. Our consideration of the properties of slow waves is conducted using the infinite magnetic field assumption. The main contribution to the wave dynamics in this assumption comes from such processes as thermal conduction, unspecified coronal heating, and optically thin radiation cooling. In our consideration, the wave periods are assumed to be short enough so that the thermal misbalance has a weak effect on them. Thus, the main non-adiabatic process affecting the wave dynamics remains thermal conduction. The exact solution of the evolutionary equation is obtained using the Fourier method. This means that it is possible to trace the evolution of any harmonic of the initial perturbation, regardless of whether it belongs to entropy or slow mode. We show that the fraction of energy between entropy and slow mode is defined by the thermal conduction and coronal loop parameters. It is shown for which parameters of coronal loops it is reasonable to associate the full solution with a slow wave, and when it is necessary to take into account the entropy wave. Furthermore, we obtain the relationships for the phase shifts of various plasma parameters applicable to any values of harmonic number and thermal condition coefficient. In particular, it is shown that the phase shifts between density and temperature perturbations for the second harmonic of the slow wave vary between $π/2$ to 0, but are larger than for the fundamental harmonic.

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