The magnetic flux of the quiet Sun internetwork as observed with the Tenerife Infrared Polarimeter

TL;DR

This study uses high-sensitivity ground-based infrared spectropolarimetry to confirm the presence of horizontal magnetic fields in the quiet Sun internetwork, highlighting the influence of atmospheric conditions on flux measurements.

Contribution

It provides a detailed comparison between ground-based infrared and satellite visible observations, emphasizing the impact of spectral line formation heights on magnetic flux estimates.

Findings

Over 60% of the quiet Sun surface shows significant polarization signals.

Horizontal magnetic flux is roughly half of the less inclined flux.

Proxies for flux are strongly affected by atmospheric thermodynamics.

Abstract

Recent observations with the HINODE satellite have found abundant horizontal magnetic fields in the internetwork quiet Sun. We compare the results on the horizontal fields with ground-based observations. We obtained 30 sec-integrated data of quiet Sun on disc centre during a period of very good seeing. The data have a rms noise in polarization of around 2 10^-4 of the continuum intensity. The low noise level allowed for an inversion of the spectra. We compare the inversion results with proxies for the determination of magnetic flux. We confirm the presence of the horizontal fields in the quiet Sun internetwork, with voids of some granules extent of nearly zero linear polarization signal. Voids in the circular polarization signal are only of granular scale. More than 60 % of the surface show polarization signals above four times the rms noise level. We find that the total magnetic flux contained in the more inclined to horizontal fields (gamma > 45 deg) is smaller by a factor of around 2 than that of the less inclined fields. The proxies for flux determination are seen to suffer from a strong influence of the thermodynamic state of the atmosphere. We suggest that the difference of the ratio of horizontal to transversal flux between the ground-based infrared data and the satellite-based visible data is due to the different formation heights of the respective spectral lines. We caution that the true amount of magnetic flux cannot be derived directly from the spectra. For purely horizontal flux, one would need its vertical extension that has to estimated by an explicit modeling with the observed spectra as boundary conditions, or has to be taken from MHD simulations.