Chaos and Intermittency in the Solar Cycle

Where a magnetic flux tube of sufficient strength and cross section protrudes from the sun, convection is locally inhibited and a sunspot appears. The number of spots on the sun at any time varies in a cyclic, but aperiodic, manner. Models with chaos and intermittency can capture the main qualitative aspects of this temporal variability, especially if they display the mechanism of on-off intermittency. Capturing the spatio-temporal aspects of the sunspot cycle requires a more complicated model but a description in terms of waves of excitation seems promising. To clarify these possibilities, qualitative introductory remarks about chaos theory itself are included in this narrative.