Emission Measure Distribution for Diffuse Regions in Solar Active Regions

Abstract

Our knowledge of the diffuse emission that encompasses active regions is very limited. In this paper we investigate two off-limb active regions, namely, AR 10939 and AR 10961, to probe the underlying heating mechanisms. For this purpose, we have used spectral observations from Hinode/EIS and employed the emission measure (EM) technique to obtain the thermal structure of these diffuse regions. Our results show that the characteristic EM distributions of the diffuse emission regions peak at log T = 6.25 and the coolward slopes are in the range 1.4-3.3. This suggests that both low- as well as high-frequency nanoflare heating events are at work. Our results provide additional constraints on the properties of these diffuse emission regions and their contribution to the background/foreground when active region cores are observed on-disk.