English

Bihelical spectrum of solar magnetic helicity and its evolution

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2019-01-14 v1

Abstract

Using a recently developed two-scale formalism to determine the magnetic helicity spectrum (Brandenburg et al. 2017), we analyze synoptic vector magnetograms built with data from the Vector Spectromagnetograph (VSM) instrument on the \emph{Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun} (SOLIS) telescope during January 2010-July 2016. In contrast to an earlier study using only three Carrington rotations, our analysis includes 74 synoptic Carrington rotation maps. We recover here bihelical spectra at different phases of solar cycle~24, where the net magnetic helicity in the majority of the data is consistent with a large-scale dynamo with helical turbulence operating in the Sun. More than 20%20\% of the analyzed maps, however, show violations of the expected sign rule.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1804.04994,
  title  = {Bihelical spectrum of solar magnetic helicity and its evolution},
  author = {Nishant K. Singh and Maarit J. Käpylä and Axel Brandenburg and Petri J. Käpylä and Andreas Lagg and Ilpo Virtanen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.04994},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

10 pages, 10 figures, submitted to the Astrophysical Journal