"Future Solar Physics with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST)"

Abstract:

During the last decades, the synergistic development of large aperture telescopes and real time and post facto techniques for image degradation correction, have allowed observations of the solar atmosphere at resolutions up to tens of arcsecond. The analysis of these data, together with the development of sophisticated inversion techniques to infer properties of the magnetic field, have largely improved our understanding of many aspects of solar physics which include the nature and properties of small scale magnetic elements, the fine structuring of sunspots, the properties of granulation and its interaction with the magnetic field, the propagation of waves from the photosphere to the chromosphere, the highly dynamics and fine structuring of the chromosphere. Still several issues, like the origin and nature of the photospheric magnetism, especially in the quiet Sun, the properties of the chromospheric magnetic field, the chromospheric energy budget, and the properties of the photospheric and chromospheric plasma and magnetic field during eruptive events, remain open. Moreover, state-of-the-art magneto hydrodynamic simulations produce structures down to the spatial resolution of the simulations themselves (generally, few kilometers per pixel), which are unresolved in current observations. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST), with its four meter aperture and state-of-the-art adaptive optics, will allow the acquisition of hundredths of arcsecond spatial resolution data. In this contribution I review the main open questions that the analysis of DKIST observations will allow to address.