Abstract
Coronal bright points are ubiquitous, highly energetic events that are often seen accompanying other dynamic and eruptive phenomena in the solar atmosphere. Their large energy output, their similarity to active regions and their connections to other events make them especially interesting to understand the solar corona. This talk will describe the findings of a recent project focusing on the hottest loop constituents of coronal bright points. We extract and analyse the hot loops of three different state-of-the-art radiative-MHD Bifrost simulations, studying their basic thermodynamic, magnetic and geometrical properties. The simulated loop properties are compared to a recent observational dataset, the first detailed study of this kind found in the literature, finding great compatibility between simulations and observations. Additionally, the loop geometry is assessed by focusing on the deviations from the commonly-assumed semi-circularity, another aspect that has been overlooked so far. We study the heating and cooling mechanisms acting on the loops, a fundamental aspect to accurately model the energy balance of these structures and their contribution to the coronal heating. The results show that only the 3D simulations show strong Joule and viscous heating in the footpoints. This reveals a localized source of entropy possibly stemming from 3D magnetic reconnection at the footpoints, which is consistent with other findings in this work.