Understanding the Dynamics of Magnetic Field and Plasma in the Interior and Atmosphere of the Sun

George Fisher has worked in Solar Physics and Astronomy for over 40 years. He will review contributions made by him and his collaborators to understanding the dynamics of the atmosphere during solar and stellar flares. He will then describe research on the dynamics of magnetic fields in the solar interior, using thin flux tube models as well as MHD simulation. He will then discuss constraints on coronal heating mechanisms from combined magnetic field and X-ray observation. Finally, he will describe the efforts that he and collaborators have made to develop “data-driven” models of the solar atmosphere, focusing on inversion techniques to determine velocity fields from a sequence of images, and to find the electric field in the photosphere from the temporal evolution of magnetic fields observed there.