Rapidly evolving braids in a compact loop system. Panels a–i: capture the formation and evolution of braided coronal loops in the decaying AR-II (white box in Fig. A.5). Panel e: the arrow points to a plasma jet. Panel f: the red and black arrows point to a pair of pixels placed along the braided loops. The red and black HRI_EUV light curves plotted in panel j are obtained from the corresponding colored pixels in panel f. The intensity of the displayed images is on a square-root scale. See Sect. 4 for a discussion. An animation of panel a is available online.