| Abstract : | MHD waves and oscillations are now known to exist throughout the solar atmosphere, spanning a wide range of spatial scales and wave periods, thanks to recent solar observations. However, in solar physics, the exact source of excitation, accurate description of wave characteristics, and their likely contribution in balancing radiative losses remain far from clear. Furthermore, the solar surface is turbulent, consisting of disordered plasma motions across a wide variety of lengthscales and/or timescales. These plasma motions can be rotating, such as intergranular vortices, or vertical, such as global p-modes, or they can be random. Influenced by the topology of omnipresent magnetic fields throughout the solar atmosphere, these motions excite various MHD waves that travel to higher solar atmospheric layers. Therefore, tracking magnetic field lines – along which waves propagate – is necessary to understand the wave characteristics and accompanying energetic processes. To do so, we devised a method that allows us to track individual magnetic field lines in both space and time in our MHD simulations and investigate the waves that propagate along them. We found that slow magneto-acoustic waves propagate along the field lines and convert into shocks in the middle chromosphere. Their energy flux in the middle chromosphere is sufficient to overcome the radiative energy losses in the layers above. Since slow MHD waves have plasma oscillations along the background magnetic field, they are easier to detect than transverse MHD waves. Furthermore, MHD waves regularly encounter magnetic null points in the solar corona, emphasizing the use of an appropriate wave identification approach to investigate their interaction and the subsequent phenomena. A new MHD wave decomposition method is proposed that overcomes the constraints of previous wave identification methods and allows us to investigate energy fluxes in distinct MHD modes at different locations of the solar atmosphere. |
