Where is the coronal loop plasma located, within a flux rope or between flux ropes?

Without scrutinizing reflection, the plasma comprising a coronal loop is usually regarded to reside within a flux rope. This picture seems to have been adopted from laboratory plasma pinches, in which a plasma of high density and pressure is confined in the vicinity of the flux rope axis by magnetic tension and magnetic pressure of the concave inward magnetic field. Such a configuration, in which the plasma pressure gradient and the field line curvature vector are almost parallel, however, is known to be vulnerable to ballooning instabilities (to which belong interchange instabilities as a subset). In coronal loops, however, ideal MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) ballooning instabilities are impeded by a very small field line curvature and the line-tying condition. We, therefore, focus on non-ideal (resistive) effects in this study. The footpoints of coronal loops are constantly under random motions of convective scales, which twist individual loop strands quite randomly. The loop strands with the axial current of the same direction tend to coalesce by magnetic reconnection. In this reconnection process, the plasma in the loop system is redistributed in such a way that a smaller potential energy of the system is attained. We have performed numerical MHD simulations to investigate the plasma redistribution in coalescence of many small flux ropes. Our results clearly show that the redistributed plasma is more accumulated between flux ropes rather than near the magnetic axes of flux ropes. The Joule heating, however, creates a different temperature distribution than the density distribution. Our study may give a hint of which part of magnetic field we are looking to in an observation.