Kaifan Ji

Interference of the running waves at light bridges of a sunspot

The observations of chromospheric oscillations of two umbral light bridges (LBs) within a sunspot from NOAA Active Region 12127 are presented. It was found that the running umbral waves with periods of 2.2-2.6 minutes underwent very fast damping before approaching umbral boundaries, while those with higher periods (>2.6 minutes) could propagate outside umbrae. On two sides of each LB adjacent to umbrae, the cross-wavelet spectra displayed that the oscillations on them had a common significant power region with dominant frequencies of 2-6 minutes and phase differences of similar to 90 degrees. A counterstream of two running umbral waves in the 2-6 minute frequency range propagated toward the LBs, where they encountered each other and gave rise to constructive or even destructive interference on the LBs. In addition, the velocity and density perturbations on the LBs were found in opposite phases suggesting that the perturbations were caused by the downward propagating

A Survey of Changes in Magnetic Helicity Flux on the Photosphere During Relatively Low-class Flares

Using the 135-second cadence of the photospheric vector data provided by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager telescope on board the Solar Dynamic Observatory, we examined the time-evolution of magnetic helicity fluxes across the photosphere during 16 flares with the energy class lower than M5.0. During the flare in 4 out of 16 events, we found impulsive changes in the helicity fluxes. This indicates that even the flare with less energy could be associated with anomalistic transportation of the magnetic helicity across the photosphere. Accompanying the impulsive helicity fluxes, the poynting fluxes across the photosphere evolved from positive to negative. As such, the transportations of magnetic energy across the photosphere were toward solar interior during these flares. In each of the 4 events, the impulsive change in the helicity flux was always mainly contributed by abrupt change in horizontal velocity field on a sunspot located near the flaring polarity inversion line. The velocity field on each sunspot shows either an obvious vortex patten or an shearing patten relative to the another magnetic polarity, which tended to relax the magnetic twist or shear in the corona. During these flares, abrupt change in the Lorentz force acting on these sunspots were found. The rotational motions and shearing motions of these sunspots always had the same directions with the resultant Lorentz forces. These results support the view that the impulsive helicity transportation during the flare could be driven by the change in the Lorentz force applied on the photosphere.

The Formation of a Small-Scale Filament After Flux Emergence on the Quiet Sun

We present observations of the formation process of a small-scale filament on the quiet Sun during 5u2009–u20096 February 2016 and investigate its formation cause. Initially, axa0small dipole emerged, and its associated arch filament system was found to reconnect with overlying coronal fields accompanied by numerous extreme ultraviolet bright points. When the bright points faded, many elongated dark threads formed and bridged the positive magnetic element of the dipole and the external negative network fields. Interestingly, an anticlockwise photospheric rotational motion (PRM) set in within the positive endpoint region of the newborn dark threads following the flux emergence and lasted for more than 10xa0hours. Under the drive of the PRM, these dispersive dark threads gradually aligned along the north-south direction and finally coalesced into an inverse S-shaped filament. Consistent with the dextral chirality of the filament, magnetic helicity calculations show that an amount of negative helicity was persistently injected from the rotational positive magnetic element and accumulated during the formation of the filament. These observations suggest that twisted emerging fields may lead to the formation of the filament via reconnection with pre-existing fields and release of its inner magnetic twist. The persistent PRM might trace a covert twist relaxation from below the photosphere to the low corona.

Method of composing two-dimensional scanned spectra observed by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope

In this paper we illustrate the technique used by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) to increase the spatial resolution of two-dimensional (2D) solar spectroscopy observations involving two dimensions of space and one of wavelength. Without an image stabilizer at the NVST, large scale wobble motion is present during the spatial scanning, whose instantaneous amplitude can reach 1.3 due to the Earths atmosphere and the precision of the telescope guiding system, and seriously decreases the spatial resolution of 2D spatial maps composed with scanned spectra. We make the following effort to resolve this problem: the imaging system (e.g., the TiO-band) is used to record and detect the displacement vectors of solar image motion during the raster scan, in both the slit and scanning directions. The spectral data (e.g., the H alpha line) which are originally obtained in time sequence are corrected and re-arranged in space according to those displacement vectors. Raster scans are carried out in several active regions with different seeing conditions (two rasters are illustrated in this paper). Given a certain spatial sampling and temporal resolution, the spatial resolution of the composed 2D map could be close to that of the slit-jaw image. The resulting quality after correction is quantitatively evaluated with two methods. A physical quantity, such as the line-of-sight velocities in multiple layers of the solar atmosphere, is also inferred from the re-arranged spectrum, demonstrating the advantage of this technique.

Precise Reduction of Solar Spectra Observed by the One-Meter New Vacuum Solar Telescope

We present a precise and complete procedure for processing spectral data observed by the one-meter New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST). The procedure is suitable for both sit-and-stare and raster-scan spectra. In this work, the geometric distortions of the spectra are first corrected for subsequent processes. Then, considering the temporal changes and the remnants of spectral lines in the flat-field, the original flat-field matrix is split into four independent components to ensure a high-precision flat-fielding correction, consisting of the continuum gradient matrix, slit non-uniform matrix, CCD dust matrix, and interference fringe matrix. Subsequently, the spectral line drifts and intensity fluctuations of the science data are further corrected. After precise reduction with this procedure, the measuring accuracies of the Doppler velocities for different spectral lines and of the oscillation curves of the chromosphere and photosphere are measured. The results show that the highest measuring accuracy of the Doppler velocity is within 100ms−1

Analysis of Correlation Registration Algorithms in the Observation of Solar Magnetic Field

100~mbox{m},mbox{s}^{-1}

Observations of oppositely directed umbral wavefronts rotating in sunspots obtained from the New Solar Telescope of BBSO

, which indicates that the characteristics of the photosphere and chromosphere can be studied cospatially and cotemporally with the reduced spectra of the NVST.

Composing Method for the Two-dimensional Scanning Spectra Observed by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope

This study compared and analyzed the image registration algorithms of phase correlation and cross-correlation for obtaining high SNR images. By processing both the simulated and measured images, five statistics to evaluate the results of the processing were chosen, which are the mean and variance of the difference images, the maximum correlation value of registration images, entropy of accumulated images, and energy of the magnetic images. It was concluded that the phase correlation algorithm was more sensitive to noise than cross-correlation, and the cross-correlation algorithm was more suitable for the real-time processing of solar magnetic field images.