A Solar Flare Model Including the Formation and Destruction of the Current Sheet in the Corona

A home-made cartoon with some intriguingly good ideas: field-aligned currents, a chromosphere, double layers: these are elements of how the terrestrial aurora works, and there is no reason not to seek analogs of the physics in the solar arena. The model represents current-sheet formation within a quadrupolar closed-field region, rather than in the helmet-streamer configuration found in the CSHKP pantry. A later cartoon by these authors describes their numerical simulations of a CSHKP-like current sheet. Field-aligned currents create all the interesting physics, just as they do in the terrestrial aurora; note the cross-field current closure of the coronal current systems, possibly enabled by ion-neutral coupling in the footpoints. Similar ideas are likely expressed in the Ugai cartoon, but one has to read between the (magnetic field?) lines there.