Aims. We study the vector magnetic field of a filament observed over a compact active region neutral line. Methods. Spectropolarimetric data acquired with TIP-II (VTT, Tenerife, Spain) of the 10 830 Å spectral region provide full Stokes vectors that were analyzed using three different methods: magnetograph analysis, Milne-Eddington inversions, and PCA-based atomic polarization inversions. Results. The inferred magnetic field strengths in the filament are around 600-700 G by all these three methods. Longitudinal fields are found in the range of 100-200 G whereas the transverse components become dominant, with fields as high as 500-600 G. We find strong transverse fields near the neutral line also at photospheric levels. Conclusions. Our analysis indicates that strong (higher than 500 G, but below kG) transverse magnetic fields are present in active region filaments. This corresponds to the highest field strengths reliably measured in these structures. The profiles of the helium 10 830 Å lines observed in this active region filament are dominated by the Zeeman effect.

We investigated the formation of the Mg II h-k doublet in a weakly magnetized atmosphere (20-100 G) using a newly developed numerical code for polarized RT in a plane-parallel geometry, which implements a recent formulation of partially coherent scattering by polarized multi-term atoms in arbitrary magnetic field regimes. Our results confirm the importance of partial redistribution effects in the formation of the Mg II h and k lines, as pointed out by previous work in the non-magnetic case. We show that the presence of a magnetic field can produce measurable modifications of the broadband linear polarization even for relatively small field strengths (∼10 G), while the circular polarization remains well represented by the classical magnetograph formula.Both these results open an important new window for the weak-field diagnostics of the upper solar atmosphere.

We present a generalized frequency redistribution function for the polarized two-term atom in an arbitrary magnetic field. This result is derived within a new formulation of the quantum problem of coherent scattering of polarized radiation by atoms in the collisionless regime. The general theory, which is based on a diagrammatic treatment of the atom-photon interaction, is still work in progress. However, the results anticipated here are relevant enough for the study of the magnetism of the solar chromosphere and of interest for astrophysics in general.

We analyze two regions of the quiet Sun (35.6 × 35.6 Mm 2 ) observed at high spatial resolution ( 100 km) in polarized light by the IMaX spectropolarimeter onboard the Sunrise balloon. We identify 497 small-scale (∼400 km) magnetic loops, appearing at an effective rate of 0.25 loop h −1 arcsec −2 ; further, we argue that this number and rate are underestimated by ∼30%. However, we find that these small dipoles do not appear uniformly on the solar surface: their spatial distribution is rather filamentary and clumpy, creating dead calm areas, characterized by a very low magnetic signal and a lack of organized loop-like structures at the detection level of our instruments, that cannot be explained as just statistical fluctuations of a Poisson spatial process. We argue that this is an intrinsic characteristic of the mechanism that generates the magnetic fields in the very quiet Sun. The spatiotemporal coherences and the clumpy structure of the phenomenon suggest a recurrent, intermittent mechanism for the generation of magnetic fields in the quietest areas of the Sun.