Physical properties of chromospheric features : Plage, peacock jets, and calibrating it all

Abstract: The chromosphere is a complex and dynamic layer of the solar atmosphere, largely dominated by the local magnetic field configuration. It acts as an important interface between the photosphere below it and the hot corona above. However, studying this layer is not straightforward, as it is largely transparent in optical wavelengths. On top of that most of its observable radiation is formed in conditions far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and thus only partially sensitive to local plasma conditions. Observations of the active features found in the chromosphere such as plage, fibrils, and jets, are therefore more difficult to interpret than emission from active features in the photosphere.This thesis focuses on plage and peacock-jets, two types of chromospheric features. Additionally, I study the quiet solar atmosphere for calibration purposes. In all three cases, I utilize high-resolution spectral and spectro-polarimetric data from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) in order to constrain the physical parameters of these regions and to create high-resolution reference profiles of the quiet regions.In the first paper, the magnetic field vector of a plage region is inferred using STiC, a spectro-polarimetric inversion code, which is achieved after applying several methods to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.In the second paper, a peacock jet near an X9.3-class flare is studied. The expanding flare ribbon moves under the jet and inhibits new material from being accelerated upwards. This coupled with back-lighting from the heavily broadened line profile of the flare ribbon that can be approximated as quasi-continuum, allowed us to estimate its density and mass by using a cloud model.  The third paper is an observational study of the center-to-limb variations of ten spectral lines commonly used for solar diagnostics.