Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009spd....40.1913l&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, SPD meeting #40, #19.13; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.849
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Magnetic reconnection is believed to be the prime mechanism to trigger solar flares and accelerate electrons up to energies of MeV. In the classical two-dimensional reconnection model, the separation motion of chromospheric ribbons manifests the successive reconnection that takes place higher up in the corona. Meanwhile, downward traveling energetic electrons bombard the dense chromosphere and create hard X-ray emissions, which provide a valuable diagnostic of electron acceleration. Analyses of ribbon dynamics and hard X-ray spectrum have been carried out separately. We here report a study of the comparison of reconnection electric field measured from ribbon motion and hardness (spectral index) of X-ray emission derived from X-ray spectrum. Our survey of the maximum average reconnection electric field and the minimum overall spectral index for 13 two-ribbon flares show that they are strongly anti-correlated. The former is also strongly correlated with flare magnitude measured using the peak flux of soft X-ray emissions. These support the hypothesis that direct acceleration by the electric field generated by magnetic reconnection may play an important role in producing energetic electrons in flares. This work is supported by NSF grants ATM 08-19662 and ATM 07-45744, and NASA grants NNX 08AQ90G and NNX 07AH78G.
Liu Chang
Wang Hai-Hong
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