Authors: Tong Shi (SETI Institute), Ward Manchester IV (University of Michigan), Enrico Landi (University of Michigan), Bart van der Holst (University of Michigan), Judit Szente (University of Michigan), Yuxi Chen (Boston University), Gabor Toth (University of Michigan), Luca Bertello (National Solar Observatory), Alexander Pevtsov (National Solar Observatory)

The coronal heating problem has been a major challenge in solar physics, and tremendous amount of effort has been made over the past several decades to solve it. Here, we aim at answering how the physical processes behind the Alfven wave turbulent heating adopted in the Alfven Wave Solar atmosphere Model (AWSoM) unfold in individual plasma loops in an active region (AR). We perform comprehensive investigations in a statistical manner on the wave dissipation and reflection, temperature distribution, heating scaling laws, and energy balance along the loops, providing in-depth insights into the energy allocation in the lower solar atmosphere. We demonstrate that our 3D global model with a physics-based phenomenological formulation for the Alfven wave turbulent heating yields a heating rate exponentially decreasing from loop footpoints to top, which had been empirically assumed in the past literature. A detailed differential emission measure (DEM) analysis of the AR is also performed, and the simulation compares favorably with DEM curves obtained from Hinode/EIS observations. This is the first work to examine the detailed AR energetics of our AWSoM model with high numerical resolution and further demonstrates the capabilities of low-frequency Alfven wave turbulent heating in producing realistic plasma properties and energetics in an AR.