The main research objective of this five-year CAREER project is to investigate the physical mechanisms responsible for the heating of the solar atmosphere. This project explores challenging new regimes of physics, including:

1. non-equilibrium ionization due to the short timescales of plasma evolution during the heating events on the Sun; and
2. substantial heat flux limiting and de-localization where the global plasma structure must be considered in the transport of energy through the solar atmosphere.

The proposed research program has two primary goals:

1. learn about the physics of the almost entirely unexplored regime of very high temperature, low density plasma in the solar corona; and
2. use what is learned to find strong constraints on the properties of coronal heating.

The program of research presents the opportunity to study a new regime of thermal energy transport, in which the global structure of the plasma must be considered, and to determine how it affects the overall energy balance of the Sun’s upper atmosphere. This is of value to other areas of space plasma physics. By combining what is learned from the hot emission with what is already known from the warm emission, strong constraints will be placed on the properties of coronal heating.