Radio Echo in the Turbulent Corona and Simulations of Solar Drift-Pair Radio Bursts

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation of solar drift-pair radio bursts through simulations of radio-wave propagation in the turbulent corona, revealing that refraction and scattering processes, especially turbulent reflection, are key to their appearance.

Contribution

It introduces a new anisotropic scattering model that quantitatively reproduces drift-pair burst properties and links their formation to plasma turbulence and whistler packets.

Findings

Drift-pair bursts can be explained by refraction and scattering in turbulent plasma.

The model reproduces source size, motion, and delays observed in bursts.

Bursts are more likely observed near the disk center below 100 MHz.

Abstract

Drift-pair bursts are an unusual type of solar low-frequency radio emission, which appear in the dynamic spectra as two parallel drifting bright stripes separated in time. Recent imaging spectroscopy observations allowed for the quantitative characterization of the drifting pairs in terms of source size, position, and evolution. Here, the drift-pair parameters are qualitatively analyzed and compared with the newly-developed Monte Carlo ray-tracing technique simulating radio-wave propagation in the inhomogeneous anisotropic turbulent solar corona. The results suggest that the drift-pair bursts can be formed due to a combination of the refraction and scattering processes, with the trailing component being the result of turbulent reflection (turbulent radio echo). The formation of drift-pair bursts requires an anisotropic scattering with the level of plasma density fluctuations comparable to that in type III bursts, but with a stronger anisotropy at the inner turbulence scale. The anisotropic radio-wave scattering model can quantitatively reproduce the key properties of drift-pair bursts: the apparent source size and its increase with time at a given frequency, the parallel motion of the source centroid positions, and the delay between the burst components. The trailing component is found to be virtually co-spatial and following the main component. The simulations suggest that the drift-pair bursts are likely to be observed closer to the disk center and below 100 MHz due to the effects of free-free absorption and scattering. The exciter of drift-pairs is consistent with propagating packets of whistlers, allowing for a fascinating way to diagnose the plasma turbulence and the radio emission mechanism.