A Comprehensive Study of Interaction of Magnetic Flux Ropes Leading to Solar Eruption

Solar observations often show that interaction of more than one flux rope is involved in solar eruptions. In this regard, Lau and Finn (1996) intensively studied the interaction of two flux ropes, which reside in between two parallel planes each mimicking one polarity region of the solar photosphere. However, this geometry is quite far from the real solar situation, in which all feet of flux tubes are rooted in one surface only. In this paper, we study the interaction of two flux ropes in a semi-infinite region above a plane representing the solar photosphere. Four cases of the flux rope interaction are investigated in our MHD simulation study: (1) parallel axial fields and parallel axial currents (co-helicity), (2) antiparallel axial fields and parallel axial currents (counter-helicity), (3) parallel axial fields and antiparallel axial currents (counter-helicity), and (4) antiparallel axial fields and antiparallel axial currents (co-helicity). Each case consists of four or six subcases according to the background field direction relative to the flux ropes and the relative positions of the flux rope footpoints. In our simulations, all the cases eventually show eruptive behaviors, but their degree of explosiveness and field topological evolutions are quite different. We construct artificial emission measure maps based on the simulations and compare them with images of CME observations, which provides us with information on what field configurations may generate certain eruption features.