Inferring the equatorial solar tachocline from frequency splittings

Abstract

Helioseismic inversions, carried out for several years on various ground-based and spatial observations, have shown that the solar rotation rate presents two principal regimes: a quasi-rigid rotation in the radiative interior and a latitude-dependent rotation in the whole convection zone. The thin layer, named solar tachocline, between these two regimes is difficult to infer through inverse techniques because of the ill-posed nature of the problem that requires regularization techniques which, in their global form, tend to smooth out any high gradient in the solution. Thus, most of the previous attempts to study the rotation profile of the solar tachocline have been carried out through forward modeling. In this work we show that some appropriate inverse techniques can also be used and we compare the ability of three 1D inverse techniques combined with two automatic strategies for the choice of the regularization parameter, to infer the solar tachocline profile in the equatorial plane. Our work, applied on LOWL (LOWL is an abbreviation for low degree denoted by L) two years dataset, argue in favor of a very sharp (0.05+/-0.03R_sun) transition zone located at 0.695+/-0.005R_sun which is in good agreement with the previous forward analysis carried out on Global Oscillations Network Group (GONG), Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) and LOWL datasets.