Statistical Properties of Photospheric Magnetic Elements Observed by the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory

Magnetic elements of the solar surface are studied (using the 6173 angstrom Fe I line) in magnetograms recorded with the high-resolution Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)/Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI). To extract some statistical and physical properties of these elements (e.g. filling factors, magnetic flux, size, and lifetimes), we employed the region-based method called Yet Another Feature Tracking Algorithm (YAFTA). An area of 400 '' x 400 '' was selected to investigate the magnetic characteristics in 2011. The correlation coefficient between filling factors of negative and positive polarities is 0.51. A broken power-law fit was applied to the frequency distribution of size and flux. Exponents of the power-law distributions for sizes smaller and greater than 16 arcsec(2) were found to be -2.24 and -4.04, respectively. The exponents of power-law distributions for fluxes lower and greater than 2.63 x 10(19) Mx were found to be -2.11 and -2.51, respectively. The relationship between the size [S] and flux [F] of elements can be expressed by a power-law behavior of the form of S proportional to F-0.69. The lifetime and its relationship with the flux and size of quiet-Sun (QS) elements during three days were studied. The code detected patches with lifetimes of about 15 hours, which we call long-duration events. We found that more than 95% of the magnetic elements have lifetimes shorter than 100 minutes. About 0.05% of the elements had lifetimes of more than six hours. The relationships between size [S], lifetime [T], and flux [F] for patches in the QS yield power-law relationships S proportional to T-0.25 and F proportional to T-0.38, respectively. Executing a detrended-fluctuation analysis of the time series of new emerged magnetic elements, we found a Hurst exponent of 0.82, which implies a long-range temporal correlation in the system.