Detection of Flux Emergence, Splitting, Merging, and Cancellation of Network Fields. II Apparent Unipolar Flux Change and Cancellation

TL;DR

This study analyzes the frequency and characteristics of apparent unipolar flux changes, cancellation, and emergence in quiet solar regions, revealing that many apparent unipolar events are interactions below detection limits and confirming flux dependence in cancellation.

Contribution

It provides detailed statistical analysis of flux interactions, emphasizing the prevalence of sub-detection-limit processes and confirming flux-dependent cancellation behavior.

Findings

Unipolar events are more frequent than cancellation and emergence.

Flux changes during unipolar processes concentrate near detection limits.

Flux decrease during cancellation follows a power-law with index ~2.48.

Abstract

In this second paper in the series, we investigate occurrence frequencies of apparent unipolar processes, cancellation, and emergence of patch structures in quiet regions. Apparent unipolar events are considerably more frequent than cancellation and emergence as per our definition, which is consistent with Lamb et al. (2013). Furthermore, we investigate the frequency distributions of changes in flux during apparent unipolar processes are and found that they concentrate around the detection limit of the analysis. Combining these findings with the results of our previous paper, Iida et al. (2012), that merging and splitting are more dominant than emergence and cancellation, these results support the understanding that apparent unipolar processes are actually interactions with and among patches below the detection limit and that there still are numerous flux interactions between the flux range in this analysis and below the detection limit. We also investigate occurrence frequency distributions of flux decrease during cancellation. We found a relatively strong dependence, 2.48$\pm$0:26 as a power-law index. This strong dependence on flux is consistent with the model, which is suggested in the previous paper.