1211.6015 (I. G. Hannah et al.)

The effect of turbulent density fluctuations on wave-particle interactions and solar flare X-ray spectrum    [PDF]

I. G. Hannah, E. P. Kontar, H. A. S. Reid

To demonstrate the effect of turbulent background density fluctuations on flare accelerated electron transport in the solar corona. Using the quasi-linear approximation, we numerically simulate the propagation of a beam of accelerated electrons from the solar corona to chromosphere, including the self-consistent response of the inhomogeneous background plasma in the form of Langmuir waves. We calculate the X-ray spectrum from these simulations using the bremsstrahlung cross-section and fit the footpoint spectrum using the collisional "thick-target" model, a standard approach adopted in observational studies. We find that the interaction of the Langmuir waves with the background electron density gradient shifts the waves to higher phase velocity where they then resonate with higher velocity electrons. The consequence is that some of the electrons are shifted to higher energies, producing more high energy X-rays than expected in the cases where the density inhomogeneity is not considered. We find that the level of energy gain is strongly dependent on the initial electron beam density at higher energy and the magnitude of the density gradient in the background plasma. The most significant gains are for steep (soft) spectra which had few electrons initially at higher energies. If the X-ray spectrum of the simulated footpoint emission are fitted using the standard "thick-target" model some simulation scenarios produce more than an order-of-magnitude over estimate of the number of electrons $>50$keV in the source coronal distribution.

View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.6015