TURBULENT PAIR DISPERSION OF PHOTOSPHERIC BRIGHT POINTS

Abstract

Observations of solar granulation obtained with the New Solar Telescope of Big Bear Solar Observatory are used to study the turbulent pair dispersion of photospheric bright points in a quiet-Sun area, a coronal hole, and an active region plage. In all the three magnetic environments, it is found that the pair mean-squared separation Δ2(t) follows a power-law timescaling Δ2(t) ~ t η in the range 10 s t 400 s. The power-law index is found to be η 1.5 for all the three investigated regions. It is shown that these results can be explained in the same framework as the classical Batchelor theory, under the hypothesis that the observed range of timescales corresponds to a non-asymptotic regime in which the photospheric bright points keep the memory of their initial separations.