Five-minute oscillation power within magnetic elements in the solar atmosphere

TL;DR

This study models the suppression of acoustic wave power in solar magnetic elements, showing that power reduction occurs below the acoustic cut-off frequency and intensifies with height, aligning with observations.

Contribution

It introduces a fibril-based model focusing on sausage waves to explain power suppression in magnetic elements, extending understanding of wave behavior in the solar atmosphere.

Findings

Power suppression occurs below the acoustic cut-off frequency.

The magnitude of power deficit increases with height.

The area of power suppression expands with height.

Abstract

It has long been known that magnetic plage and sunspots are regions in which the power of acoustic waves is reduced within the photospheric layers. Recent observations now suggest that this suppression of power extends into the low chromosphere and is also present in small magnetic elements far from active regions. In this paper we investigate the observed power supression in plage and magnetic elements, by modelling each as a collection of vertically aligned magnetic fibrils and presuming that the velocity within each fibril is the response to buffeting by incident $p$ modes in the surrounding field-free atmosphere. We restrict our attention to modeling observations made near solar disk center, where the line-of-sight velocity is nearly vertical and hence, only the longitudinal component of the motion within the fibril contributes. Therefore, we only consider the excitation of axisymmetric sausage waves and ignore kink oscillations as their motions are primarily horizontal. We compare the vertical motion within the fibril with the vertical motion of the incident $p$ mode by constructing the ratio of their powers. In agreement with observational measurements we find that the total power is suppressed within strong magnetic elements for frequencies below the acoustic cut-off frequency. We also find that the magnitude of the power deficit increases with the height above the photosphere at which the measurement is made. Further, we argue that the area of the solar disk over which the power suppression extends increases as a function of height.