Temperature Response Functions

 

The AIA instrument on the Solar Dynamics Observatory doesn't have any spectroscopic abilities so it has no way to calibrate the data directly. My projects wavelength response and temperature response function are necessary to infer plasma properties like temperature and density using this instruement. Essentially, the temperature response function calculates the sensitivity of light from the plasma at specific wavelengths and temperatures as measured by the AIA. 

These plots are reproductions of those found in Boerner et al. (2012) . Figure 11 in this paper utilized initial calibrations of AIA.  I use last posts wavelength response function (that utilize instrument information as found in Version 6 of SSW data files) to obtain this new function:

Temperature Response Functions

This displays the temperature response for all six extreme ultra violet channels (EUV) observed with the AIA instrument vs Temperature on a log 10 scale. It is calculated by multiplying the wavelength response function times an ion contribution function, and then iterating through all of the wavelengths in the desired region.

The wavelength response function that I previously implemented tell the efficiency of the optics around each instruments channels wavelength center. The new and difficult part of this function was implementing the contribution function of each ion. This is where I've utilyzed ChiantiPy. This python package accesses CHIANTI, an 'Atomic Database for Spectroscopic Diagnostics of Astrophyiscal Plasmas'. As well as having a large range of atomic elements, this code analyses each ion to get attributes such as ionization, intensity of various lines, and emission measurements. The contribution function in ChiantiPy uses these  parameters and is strongly peaked in temperature. With it, we can gauge the sensitivity of light from the plasma seen by the AIA instrument as a function of wavelength and temperature.

Temperature Response Per Channel VS Temperature  

 Channels: 94, 131, 171, 193, 211, 304, 335

Temperature is on a log base 10 scale

The values for these response functions are still a bit higher than anticipated. At first, I tried incorporating the plate scale of the instrument to see if this helped, but unless I also multiply by an assumed density, the units for this do not match to the expected result. 

Finishing up Goals:

1.  I edited ChiantiPy so that the contribution function would not plot. This allowed me to obtain the values for multiple ions at a time. Unfortunately, this means that I am needing this to be added to ChiantiPy on github if this code is going to be implemented into Sunpy on github. The issue I ran into with this is that I had been editing a lot of my version of ChiantiPy while I was testing out different methods. I plan reinstalling the github version, inserting my changes in just the contribution function, and submitting a pull request asap!
2. One change that was recommended in the SunPy developer meeting last week is to make a dataframe containing the ion contributions. This will speed up the process if it can be read each time instead of calculating them each time. I think this is a great idea and am in the midst of implementing it.
3. I'd like to make this code as general as possible. This means adding more keywords so the user can specify their own temperature, density, ions, etc. 
4. Documentation! This is something I've taken time to read up on more this week because I recognize how wonderful convention can be when making code more readable. It is a process that I am still working through.