Bibcode
DOI
Socas-Navarro, H.; Trujillo Bueno, J.; Ruiz Cobo, B.
Referencia bibliográfica
The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 530, Issue 2, pp. 977-993.
Fecha de publicación:
2
2000
Revista
Número de citas
140
Número de citas referidas
117
Descripción
This paper presents a new diagnostic tool for the inference of the
thermal, dynamic, and magnetic properties of the solar chromosphere. It
consists of a non-LTE inversion code of Stokes profiles induced by the
Zeeman effect in magnetized stellar atmospheres. This code is the
generalization, to the non-LTE Stokes transfer case, of the inversion
code for unpolarized line profiles of Socas-Navarro, Ruiz Cobo, &
Trujillo Bueno. It is based upon a full non-LTE multilevel treatment of
Zeeman line transfer in which the thermal, magnetic, and dynamic
properties of the atmospheric model are adjusted automatically by means
of nonlinear least-squares-fitting techniques until a best fit to the
observed Stokes profiles is obtained. Our non-LTE inversion approach is
based on the concept of response functions, which measure the emergent
Stokes profiles' first-order reaction to changes in the atmospheric
parameters. We generalize our fixed departure coefficients (FDC)
approximation in order to allow fast computation of such response
functions in the present non-LTE Zeeman line transfer context. We
present several numerical tests showing the reliability of our inversion
method for retrieving the information about the thermodynamics and the
magnetic field vector that is contained in the polarization state of the
chosen spectral lines. We also explore the limitations of the inversion
code by applying it to simulated observations where the physical
hypotheses on which it is based on are not met. Finally, we apply our
non-LTE Stokes inversion code to real spectropolarimetric observations
of a sunspot observed in the IR triplet lines of Ca II. As a result, a
new mean model of the sunspot chromosphere is provided.