Breaking News
The stochastic, intermittent nature of quiet Sun magnetism

Abstract

The quiet Sun (the 99%, or more, of the solar surface not covered by sunspots or active regions) is receiving increased attention in recent years; its role on the global magnetism and its complexity are being increasingly recognised. A picture of a rather stochastic quiet Sun magnetism is emerging. From these recent works, the quiet Sun magnetism is presented as a myriad of magnetic field vectors having an isotropical distribution with a cascade of scales down to the mean free path of the photon. But this chaotic representation also shows clear signs of intermittency: at a low frequency rate (0.022 events h^-1 arcsec^-2) the magnetic field appear in the quiet Sun forming well-organised loop structures at granular scales. More interesting, these loops rise to higher layers and their energy input into the chromosphere can be important for the heating of this layer. In the talk, I will present a pedagogic view of the quiet Sun magnetism. I will focus on the ascent of the smallest ever observed magnetic flux emergence through the solar atmosphere. More specifically, I will show how to infer from high resolution, spectro-polarimetric observations (taken with the SOT instrument onboard Hinode) the magnetic topology of the fields, how they rise through the photosphere to the chromosphere, and the implications of this phenomena for chromospheric (and coronal) heating.