Energy Deposition by Energetic Electrons in a Diffusive Collisional Transport Model

TL;DR

This paper examines how including angular scattering in models of energetic electron transport affects energy deposition profiles in solar flare atmospheres, revealing significant shifts in heating regions.

Contribution

It introduces a simplified expression for energy deposition considering angular diffusion and compares it with traditional deterministic models, highlighting the importance of angular scattering.

Findings

Significant shift of heating from lower to upper corona with unidirectional injection.

Minor shift in heating with isotropic injection.

Comparison shows differences in return current Ohmic heating profiles.

Abstract

A considerable fraction of the energy in a solar flare is released as suprathermal electrons; such electrons play a major role in energy deposition in the ambient atmosphere and hence the atmospheric response to flare heating. Historically the transport of these particles has been approximated through a deterministic approach in which first-order secular energy loss to electrons in the ambient target is treated as the dominant effect, with second-order diffusive terms (in both energy and angle) being generally either treated as a small correction or neglected. However, it has recently been pointed out that while neglect of diffusion in energy may indeed be negligible, diffusion in angle is of the same order as deterministic scattering and hence must be included. Here we therefore investigate the effect of angular scattering on the energy deposition profile in the flaring atmosphere. A relatively simple compact expression for the spatial distribution of energy deposition into the ambient plasma is presented and compared with the corresponding deterministic result. For unidirectional injection there is a significant shift in heating from the lower corona to the upper corona; this shift is much smaller for isotropic injection. We also compare the heating profiles due to return current Ohmic heating in the diffusional and deterministic models.