Thursday

With the advent of next generation high resolution telescopes, our understanding of how the magnetic field is organized in the internetwork photosphere is likely to advance significantly. We aim to evaluate the extent to which we can retrieve accurate information about the magnetic vector in the internetwork photosphere using inversion techniques. We use snapshots produced from high resolution (25x25x14 km) three-dimensional magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) simulations and employ the Stokes inversions based on response functions (SIR) code to produce synthetic observables in the same near infrared spectral window as observed by the GREGOR Infrared Spectrograph, which contains the highly magnetically sensitive photospheric Fe I line pair at 15648.52 Å and 15652.87 Å. We then use a parallelized wrapper to SIR to perform nearly 14 million inversions of the synthetic spectra to test how well the ‘true’ MHD atmospheric parameters can be constrained statistically. We find that the depth-averaged parameters can be very well recovered by the inversions, and by adding simple gradients to magnetic field strength, inclination and line of sight velocity we show the extent to which we can constrain these parameters at various optical depths. Finally, we degrade the synthetic spectra spectrally and spatially to GREGOR resolutions and examine how this influences real observations, considering the impact of stray light and noise in particular. We discuss how our results should be interpreted to help guide future observers at GREGOR and also the considerations that must be made for DKIST-era observations.