An Elemental Abundance Diagnostic for Coordinated Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EIS Observations

Abstract

Plasma composition measurements are a vital tool for the success of current and future solar missions, but density- and temperature-insensitive spectroscopic diagnostic ratios are sparse, and their underlying accuracy in determining the magnitude of the first ionization potential (FIP) effect in the solar atmosphere remains an open question. Here we assess the Fe viii 185.213 Å/Ne viii 770.428 Å intensity ratio that can be observed as a multispacecraft combination between Solar Orbiter/SPICE and Hinode/EUV Imaging Spectrometer (EIS). We find that it is fairly insensitive to temperature and density in the range of log (T/K) = 5.65–6.05 and is therefore useful, in principle, for analyzing on-orbit EUV spectra. We also perform an empirical experiment, using Hinode/EIS measurements of coronal fan loop temperature distributions weighted by randomly generated FIP bias values, to show that our diagnostic method can provide accurate results as it recovers the input FIP bias to within 10%–14%. This is encouraging since it is smaller than the magnitude of variations seen throughout the solar corona. We apply the diagnostic to coordinated observations from 2023 March and show that the combination of SPICE and EIS allows measurements of the Fe/Ne FIP bias in the regions where the footpoints of the magnetic field connected to Solar Orbiter are predicted to be located. The results show an increase in FIP bias between the main leading polarity and the trailing decayed polarity that broadly agrees with Fe/O in situ measurements from Solar Orbiter/Solar Wind Analyser. Multispacecraft coordinated observations are complex, but this diagnostic also falls within the planned wavebands for Solar-C/Extreme UltraViolet high-throughput Spectroscopic Telescope.