Changes in the photospheric magnetic field associated with solar flares

The flare-related, persistent and abrupt changes in the photospheric magnetic field have been reported by many authors during recent years. These bewildering observational results pose a challenge to the current flare theories in which the photospheric magnetic field usually remains unchanged in the eruption. In this paper, changes in the photosphere magnetic field during the solar eruption are investigated based on the catastrophe model. The results indicate that the projection effect is an important source that yields the change in the observed photospheric magnetic field in the line-of-sight. Furthermore one may observe the change in the normal component of magnetic field if the spectrum line used to measure the photospheric magnetic field does not exactly come from the photospheric surface. Our results also show that the significance of selecting the correct spectral lines to study the photospheric field becomes more apparent for the magnetic configurations with complex boundary condition (or background field). (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.