  White-light flares (WLFs), first observed in 1859, refer to a type of solar
flares showing an obvious enhancement of the visible continuum emission. This
type of enhancement often occurs in most energetic flares, and is usually
interpreted as a consequence of efficient heating in the lower solar atmosphere
through non-thermal electrons propagating downward from the energy release site
in the corona. However, this coronal-reconnection model has difficulty in
explaining the recently discovered small WLFs. Here we report a C2.3
white-light flare, which are associated with several observational phenomena:
fast decrease in opposite-polarity photospheric magnetic fluxes, disappearance
of two adjacent pores, significant heating of the lower chromosphere,
negligible increase of hard X-ray flux, and an associated U-shaped magnetic
field configuration. All these suggest that this white-light flare is powered
by magnetic reconnection in the lower part of the solar atmosphere rather than
by reconnection higher up in the corona.
