Probing solar convection |
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Authors: | M Brüggen |
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Institution: | Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik, Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 1, 85740 Garching, Germany; Churchill College, Cambridge CB3 0DS |
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Abstract: | In the solar convection zone, acoustic waves are scattered by turbulent sound speed fluctuations. In this paper the scattering of waves by convective cells is treated using Rytov's technique. Particular care is taken to include diffraction effects, which are important, especially for high-degree modes that are confined to the surface layers of the Sun. The scattering leads to damping of the waves and causes a phase shift. Damping manifests itself in the width of the spectral peak of p-mode eigenfrequencies. The contribution of scattering to the linewidths is estimated and the sensitivity of the results to the assumed spectrum of the turbulence is studied. Finally, the theoretical predictions are compared with recently measured linewidths of high-degree modes. |
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Keywords: | convection turbulence waves Sun: oscillations |
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