Quiet Sun coronal heating: analyzing large scale magnetic structures driven by different small-scale uniform sources

Abstract

Recent measurements of quiet Sun heating events by Krucker and Benz (1998) give strong support to Parker's (1988) hypothesis that small scale dissipative events make the main contribution to the quiet heating. Moreover, combining their observations with the analysis by Priest et al. (2000), it can be concluded that the sources driving these dissipative events are also small scale sources, typically of the order of (or smaller than) 2000 km and the resolution of modern instruments. Thus arises the question of how these small scale events participate into the larger scale observable phenomena, and how the information about small scales can be extracted from observations. This problem is treated in the framework of a simple phenomenological model introduced in Krasnoselskikh et al. (2001), which allows to switch between various small scale sources and dissipative processes. The large scale structure of the magnetic field is studied by means of Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and a derived entropy, techniques which are readily applicable to experimental data.