Surface Magnetic Flux Maintenance In Quiet Sun

TL;DR

This paper studies magnetic surface processes in the quiet Sun, revealing that merging and splitting dominate flux maintenance and are key to the power-law distribution of magnetic flux, with implications for understanding solar magnetic field structure.

Contribution

It introduces an auto-detection technique to analyze surface magnetic processes and proposes a scenario emphasizing local merging and splitting as primary in flux distribution maintenance.

Findings

Merging and splitting are the most frequent surface processes.

Flux distribution follows a power-law maintained by local processes.

Emergence and cancellation are less frequent but contribute to flux recycling.

Abstract

We investigate surface processes of magnetic patches, namely merging, splitting, emergence, and cancellation, by using an auto-detection technique. We find that merging and splitting are locally predominant in the surface level, while the frequencies of the other two are less by one or two orders of magnitude. The frequency dependences on flux con- tent of surface processes are further investigated. Based on these observations, we discuss a possible whole picture of the maintenance. Our conclusion is that the photospheric magnetic field structure, especially its power-law nature, is maintained by the processes locally in the surface not by the interactions between different altitudes. We suggest a scenario of the flux maintenance as follows: The splitting and merging play a crucial role for the generation of the power-law distribution, not the emergence nor cancellation do. This power-law distribution results in another power-law one of the cancellation with an idea of the random convective transport. The cancellation and emergence have a common value for the power-law indices in their frequency distributions, which may suggest a "recycle of fluxes by submergence and re-emergence".