Current helicity of active regions as a tracer of large-scale solar magnetic helicity

TL;DR

This study shows that the current helicity observed in solar active regions effectively traces the large-scale magnetic helicity generated by the solar dynamo, providing a valuable observational proxy.

Contribution

The paper introduces a comparison of advanced and basic mean-field dynamo models to demonstrate that active region current helicity reflects large-scale magnetic helicity more accurately than small-scale calculations.

Findings

Active region current helicity closely matches large-scale magnetic helicity.

Advanced dynamo models better reproduce observational butterfly diagrams.

Current helicity in active regions is a reliable tracer of large-scale solar magnetic helicity.

Abstract

We demonstrate that the current helicity observed in solar active regions traces the magnetic helicity of the large-scale dynamo generated field. We use an advanced 2D mean-field dynamo model with dynamo saturation based on the evolution of the magnetic helicity and algebraic quenching. For comparison, we also studied a more basic 2D mean-field dynamo model with simple algebraic alpha quenching only. Using these numerical models we obtained butterfly diagrams both for the small-scale current helicity and also for the large-scale magnetic helicity, and compared them with the butterfly diagram for the current helicity in active regions obtained from observations. This comparison shows that the current helicity of active regions, as estimated by $-{\bf A \cdot B}$ evaluated at the depth from which the active region arises, resembles the observational data much better than the small-scale current helicity calculated directly from the helicity evolution equation. Here ${\bf B}$ and ${\bf A}$ are respectively the dynamo generated mean magnetic field and its vector potential. A theoretical interpretation of these results is given.