The Multi-Instrument (EVE-RHESSI) DEM for Solar Flares, and Implications for Non-Thermal Emission

TL;DR

This study combines data from EVE and RHESSI to improve the understanding of thermal and non-thermal emissions in solar flares, providing constraints on the low-energy cutoff of non-thermal electrons.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-instrument DEM method that better separates thermal and non-thermal emissions, enabling more accurate determination of the non-thermal cutoff energy in solar flares.

Findings

Low-energy cutoffs are often below 10 keV.

Most cutoff lower limits are in the 5-7 keV range.

Early determination of cutoff energies is possible during large flares.

Abstract

Solar flare X-ray spectra are typically dominated by thermal bremsstrahlung emission in the soft X-ray ($\lesssim$10 keV) energy range; for hard X-ray energies ($\gtrsim$30 keV), emission is typically non-thermal from beams of electrons. The low-energy extent of non-thermal emission has only been loosely quantified. It has been difficult to obtain a lower limit for a possible non-thermal cutoff energy due to the significantly dominant thermal emission. Here we use solar flare data from the EUV Variability Experiment (EVE) on-board the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and X-ray data from the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) to calculate the Differential Emission Measure (DEM). This improvement over the isothermal approximation and any single-instrument DEM helps to resolve ambiguities in the range where thermal and non-thermal emission overlap, and to provide constraints on the low-energy cutoff. In the model, thermal emission is from a DEM that is parametrized as multiple gaussians in $Log(T)$. Non-thermal emission results from a photon spectrum obtained using a thick-target emission model. Spectra for both instruments are fit simultaneously in a self-consistent manner. Our results have been obtained using a sample of 52 large (GOES X- and M-class) solar flares observed between February 2011 and February 2013. It turns out that it is often possible to determine low-energy cutoffs early (in the first two minutes) during large flares. Cutoff energies are typically low, less than 10 keV, with most values of the lower limits in the 5--7 keV range.