Power Laws in Solar Flares: Self-Organized Criticality or Turbulence?

1999/04/23 by G. Boffetta, Guido Boffetta, Vincenzo Carbone +6 · 9 citations
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Chaotic #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #Criticality #Earthquake Detection and Analysis #Exponent #Intermittency #Magnetohydrodynamics #Meteorology #Nuclear physics #Physics #Plasma #Power law #Quantum mechanics #Self-organized criticality #Solar and Space Plasma Dynamics #Solar flare #Statistical physics #Statistics #Turbulence #chao-dyn #nlin.CD

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.83.4662

4 pages, 4 postscript figures. Submitted to Physical Review Letters

arxiv created 1999/04/23 · openalex publication_date 1999/11/29 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

The statistics of quiescent times \ensuremathτ_L between successive bursts of solar flares activity, performed using 20 years of data, displays a power law distribution with exponent \ensuremathα\ensuremath≃2.4. This is an indication of an underlying complex dynamics with long correlation times. The observed scaling behavior is in contradiction with the self-organized criticality models of solar flares which predict Poisson-like statistics. Chaotic models, including the destabilization of the laminar phases and subsequent restabilization due to nonlinear dynamics, are able to reproduce the power law for the quiescent times. A shell model of MHD turbulence correctly reproduces all the observed distributions.

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