# Growth Rates of the Upper-hybrid Waves for Power-law and Kappa Distributions with a Loss-cone Anisotropy

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes the growth rates of upper-hybrid waves in solar radio bursts for different electron distributions with loss-cone anisotropy, revealing conditions for zebra stripe formation and comparing theoretical predictions with observed data.

## Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of growth rates for power-law and kappa electron distributions with loss-cone anisotropy, highlighting factors influencing zebra stripe generation.

## Key findings

- Maximum growth rate at pitch-angle ~50° for power-law distribution.
- Broad frequency widths of growth rate peaks for kappa distribution.
- Distinct zebra stripes linked to anisotropic distribution with a cutoff momentum.

## Abstract

Fine structures of radio bursts play an important role in diagnostics of the solar flare plasma. Among them the zebras, which are prevalently assumed to be generated by the double plasma resonance instability, belong to the most important. In this paper we compute the growth rate of this instability for two types of the electron distribution: a) for the power-law distribution and b) for the kappa distribution, in the both cases with the loss-cone type anisotropy. We found that the growth rate of the upper-hybrid waves for the power-law momentum distribution strongly depends on the pitch-angle boundary. The maximum growth rate was found for the pitch-angle $\theta_\mathrm{c} \approx$ 50$^\circ$. For small angles the growth rate profile is very flat and for high pitch-angles the wave absorption occurs. Furthermore, analyzing the growth rate of the upper hybrid waves for the kappa momentum distribution we found that a decrease of the characteristic momentum $p_\kappa$ shifts the maximum of the growth rate to lower values of the ratio of the electron-plasma and electron-cyclotron frequencies, and the frequency widths of the growth rate peaks are very broad. But, if we consider the kappa distribution which is isotropic up to some large momentum $p_m$ and anisotropic with loss-cone above this momentum then distinct peaks of the growth rate appear and thus distinct zebra stripes can be generated. It means that the restriction for small momenta for the anisotropic part of distributions is of principal importance for the zebra stripes generation. Finally, for the 1 August 2010 zebra stripes, the growth rates in dependence on radio frequency were computed. It was shown that in this case the growth rate peaks are more distinct than in usually presented dependencies of growth rates on the ratio of the plasma and cyclotron frequencies.