Photospheric Magnetic Flux Cancellation and Associated Plasma Heating in the Upper Solar Atmosphere

Magnetic flux cancellation in the solar photosphere has been studied, in particular with respect to various types of reconnection signatures in the upper atmosphere such as plasma heating, reconnection outflows and nonthermal particle acceleration. Recently, Priest et al. (2018) proposed a theoretical model of magnetic reconnection driven by photospheric flux cancellation, which allows to analytically estimate the height and amount of energy released as heat at a reconnecting current sheet. Here we present a small-scale flux cancellation event observed by Hinode, IRIS and SDO. During flux cancellation, two opposite-polarity magnetic patches are identified and traced. Determining their flux, converging speed and overlying field strength as a function of time, we first estimate the time variation of the height and total rate of energy release through reconnection. These estimated reconnection properties of flux cancellation are then compared with the multi-wavelength IRIS and SDO/AIA observations of the associated explosive event.