Influence of local treatments of convection upon solar p mode excitation rates

We compute the rates P at which acoustic energy is injected into the solar radial p modes for several solar models. The solar models are computed with two different local treatments of convection: the classical mixing-length theory (MLT) and the formulation by Canuto et al. (1996, ApJ, 473, 550, CGM). Among the models investigated here, our best models reproduce both (i) the solar radius and the solar luminosity at solar age and (ii) the observed Balmer line profiles. For the MLT treatment, the rates P do significantly depend on the properties of the atmosphere, whereas for the CGM treatment, the dependence of P on the properties of the atmosphere is found to be smaller than the error bars attached to the seismic measurements. The excitation rates P for modes associated with the MLT models are significantly underestimated compared with the solar seismic constraints. The CGM models yield values for P closer to the seismic data than do the MLT models. We conclude that the solar p-mode excitation rates provide valuable constraints and, according to the present investigation, clearly favor the CGM treatment with respect to the MLT, although neither of them yields values of P as close to the observations as recently found for 3D numerical simulations.