Effect of turbulent density-fluctuations on wave-particle interactions and solar flare X-ray spectra

TL;DR

This study demonstrates how turbulent density fluctuations in the solar corona influence electron transport and X-ray spectra during solar flares, revealing significant effects on high-energy electron estimates.

Contribution

The paper introduces a numerical simulation incorporating background plasma inhomogeneity effects on electron transport and X-ray spectra in solar flares, highlighting the importance of density gradients.

Findings

Density fluctuations shift Langmuir waves to higher phase velocities.

Electrons gain more energy due to wave interactions in inhomogeneous plasma.

Standard spectral fitting can significantly overestimate high-energy electrons.

Abstract

The aim of this paper is 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 simulated the propagation of a beam of accelerated electrons from the solar corona to the chromosphere, including the self-consistent response of the inhomogeneous background plasma in the form of Langmuir waves. We calculated the X-ray spectrum from these simulations using the bremsstrahlung cross-section and fitted 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 a 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 if 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 that initially had few electrons at higher energies. If the X-ray spectrum of the simulated footpoint emission are fitted with the standard "thick-target" model (as is routinely done with RHESSI observations) some simulation scenarios produce more than an order-of-magnitude overestimate of the number of electrons $>50$keV in the source coronal distribution.