Non-Stationary Fast-Driven Self-Organized Criticality in Solar Flares

TL;DR

This paper presents observations of non-stationary, fast-driven solar flares with multiple energy dissipation episodes, challenging classical self-organized criticality models that assume slow, stationary processes.

Contribution

It introduces a non-stationary, fast-driven self-organized criticality model for solar flares, incorporating multiple energy dissipation episodes and non-separable time scales.

Findings

Power-law waiting time distribution with slope ~2.0.

Multiple energy dissipation episodes during most flares.

Flares exhibit pulses with ~12-minute rise and decay times.

Abstract

The original concept of self-organized criticality (Bak et al.~1987), applied to solar flare statistics (Lu and Hamilton 1991), assumed a slow-driven and stationary flaring rate, which warrants time scale separation (between flare durations and inter-flare waiting times), it reproduces power-law distributions for flare peak fluxes and durations, but predicts an exponential waiting time distribution. In contrast to these classical assumptions we observe: (i) multiple energy dissipation episodes during most flares, (ii) violation of the principle of time scale separation, (iii) a fast-driven and non-stationary flaring rate, (iv) a power law distribution for waiting times $\Delta t$, with a slope of $\alpha_{\Delta t} \approx 2.0$, as predicted from the universal reciprocality between mean flaring rates and mean waiting times; and (v) pulses with rise times and decay times of the dissipated magnetic free energy on time scales of $12\pm6$ min, up to 13 times in long-duration ($\lapprox 4$ hrs) flares. These results are inconsistent with coronal long-term energy storage (Rosner and Vaiana 1978), but require photospheric-chromospheric current injections into the corona.