Investigating the Complex Motions of Photospheric Bright Points as a Lower Boundary Condition for Coronal Magnetism

Magnetic bright points in the solar photosphere, visible in both continuum and G-band images, indicate footpoints of kilogauss magnetic flux tubes extending to the corona. Motion of these footpoints excites MHD waves which propagate to the corona. Analyzing this motion can thus provide a power spectrum of MHD wave excitation. This spectrum is a key lower boundary condition in coronal and heliospheric models. In past work, using photospheric images from a radiative magnetohydrodynamic simulation with spatial resolution higher than that of present-day observations, we performed automated tracking of bright points and generated a power spectrum of transverse bright-point centroid motions. We found slightly higher amounts of power at all frequencies compared to observation-based spectra, while confirming the spectrum shape of recent observations. This serves as a prediction for observations of bright points with DKIST, which will achieve similar resolution and high sensitivity. However, our past work was unable to process extremely long bright points, the merging or splitting of bright points, or internal motions including size or shape changes of bright points, nor the non-trivial waves produced by these motions. If bright point motion is to be used as a complete lower boundary condition for coronal waves, these additional aspects must be quantitatively understood. Such an approach must move away from centroid tracking to tracking the inferred motion of field lines at a scale near the pixel scale. With DKIST promising to provide high-resolution, high-cadence bright point observations, now is the time to develop this approach for bright points. We present efforts to measure these more complex bright point motions and analyze the resulting waves that propagate to the corona.