Solar Corona Loop Studies with AIA: I. Cross-Sectional Temperature Structure

We present a first systematic study on the cross-sectional temperature structure of coronal loops using the six coronal temperature filters of the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO). We analyze a sample of 100 loop snapshots measured at 10 different locations and 10 different times in active region NOAA 11089 on 2010 July 24, 21:00-22:00 UT. The cross-sectional flux profiles are measured and a cospatial background is subtracted in 6 filters in a temperature range of $T \approx 0.5-16$ MK, and 4 different parameterizations of differential emission measure (DEM) distributions are fitted. We find that the reconstructed DEMs consist predominantly of narrowband peak temperature components with a thermal width of $\sigma_{log(T)} \le 0.11\pm0.02$, close to the temperature resolution limit of the instrument, consistent with earlier triple-filter analysis from TRACE by Aschwanden and Nightingale (2005) and from EIS/Hinode by Warren et al. (2008) or Tripathi et al. (2009). We find that 66% of the loops could be fitted with a narrowband single-Gaussian DEM model, and 19% with a DEM consisting of two narrowband Gaussians (which mostly result from pairs of intersecting loops along the same line-of-sight). The mostly isothermal loop DEMs allow us also to derive an improved empirical response function of the AIA 94 \ang\ filter, which needs to be boosted by a factor of $q_{94} = 6.7\pm 1.7$ for temperatures at $log(T) \lapprox 6.3$. The main result of near-isothermal loop cross-sections is not consistent with the predictions of standard nanoflare scenarios, but can be explained by flare-like heating mechanisms that drive chromospheric evaporation and upflows of heated plasma coherently over loop cross-sections of $w \approx 2-4$ Mm.