The force-freeness of the solar photosphere: Revisit with new approach and large datasets

TL;DR

This study revisits the force-freeness of the solar photosphere using a new approach that reduces noise influence, revealing that the photospheric magnetic fields are far from force-free, based on large datasets from HMI/SDO and SP/Hinode.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel method to assess photospheric force-freeness by lowering spatial resolution to mitigate noise effects, providing more accurate evaluations.

Findings

Photospheric magnetic fields are largely not force-free.

Most active regions have a significant net Lorentz force.

The new approach effectively reduces noise impact in force-freeness estimation.

Abstract

Although it is generally believed that the solar photosphere is not magnetically force-free owning to its high plasma $\beta$, the estimations of force-freeness using observed magnetograms have produced disputable results. Some studies confirmed that the photosphere is largely not force-free whereas some authors argued that the photosphere is not far away from being force-free. In a previous paper of ours we demonstrated that, due to the fact that the noise levels of the transverse field in the magnetograms are much larger than those of the vertical field, wrong judgements on the force-freeness could be made: a truly force-free field could be judged as being not-force-free and a truly not-force-free field could be judged as being force-free. Here in this letter we propose an approach to overcome this serious problem. By reducing the spatial resolution to lower the noise level, the heavy influence of the measurement noise on the force-freeness judgement can be significantly suppressed. We first use two analytical solutions to show the success and the effectiveness of this approach. Then we apply this new approach to two large datasets of active region magnetograms, obtained with the HMI/SDO and SP/Hinode, respectively. Our analysis shows that the photospheric magnetic fields are actually far away from being force-free. Particularly and most notably, the mean value of Fz/Fp (where Fz the net Lorentz force in the vertical direction and Fp the total Lorentz force) is as low as -0.47, with more than 98% of the active regions having |Fz/Fp|>0.1, when using the SP/Hinode magnetograms of true field strength.