Alfvén wave dissipation in the solar chromosphere

A cartoon of outstanding pastel-colored symmetry, which displays how Alfvén waves may convert from one mode to another in the vicinity of a sunspot, especially in the context of shock formation. This physics obviously has applications anywhere there may be gradients in plasma properties, which is to say everywhere, including especially solar flares as well as sunspots. Shock waves, as well as magnetic reconnection, are able to extract energy from the magnetic field and release it into some other form, likely to be highly non-thermal in character. Global waves in the corona feature heavily in other cartoons here, but they may be dynamically even more imortant in the chromosphere.