As magnetic field breaches the surface, it begins to interact and reconnect with the existing field into which it intrudes. Observations suggest that reconnection begins shortly after flux emergence, i.e., when the field is barely protruding above the photosphere (Strous & Zwaan 1999). We have studied these processes in our first generation radiation magnetohydrodynamic simulations (Mart´ınez-Sykora et al. 2008, 2009).
With the code development in SAM we can make higher resolution simulations that can be directly compared with observations. We will:
- make experiments with a variety of magnetic configurations injected at the lower boundary of the simulations;
- make experiments with a variety of pre-existing magnetic field topologies;
- calculate synthetic diagnostics of polarization to determine the effect of observationally unresolved structure on the diagnostics;
- perform numerical simulations with higher spatial resolution.