Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 4662–4665 (1999)Power Laws in Solar Flares: Self-Organized Criticality or Turbulence?Received 30 March 1999; published in the issue dated 29 November 1999 The statistics of quiescent times τL between successive bursts of solar flares activity, performed using 20 years of data, displays a power law distribution with exponent α≃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. © 1999 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.4662
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.83.4662
PACS:
05.65.+b, 47.27.Eq, 47.52.+j, 96.60.Rd
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