Spatial damping of propagating sausage waves in coronal cylinders

Sausage modes are important in coronal seismology. Spatially damped propagating sausage waves were recently observed in the solar atmosphere. We examine how wave leakage influences the spatial damping of sausage waves propagating along coronal structures modeled by a cylindrical density enhancement embedded in a uniform magnetic field. Working in the framework of cold magnetohydrodynamics, we solve the dispersion relation (DR) governing sausage waves for complex-valued longitudinal wavenumber $k$ at given real angular frequencies $ω$. For validation purposes, we also provide analytical approximations to the DR in the low-frequency limit and in the vicinity of $ω_{\rm c}$, the critical angular frequency separating trapped from leaky waves. In contrast to the standing case, propagating sausage waves are allowed for $ω$ much lower than $ω_{\rm c}$. However, while able to direct their energy upwards, these low-frequency waves are subject to substantial spatial attenuation. The spatial damping length shows little dependence on the density contrast between the cylinder and its surroundings, and depends only weakly on frequency. This spatial damping length is of the order of the cylinder radius for $ω\lesssim 1.5 v_{\rm Ai}/a$, where $a$ and $v_{\rm Ai}$ are the cylinder radius and the Alfvén speed in the cylinder, respectively. We conclude that if a coronal cylinder is perturbed by symmetric boundary drivers (e.g., granular motions) with a broadband spectrum, wave leakage efficiently filters out the low-frequency components.

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