Return-Current Losses Revisited

Details Return-Current Losses Revisited Return-Current Losses Revisited

May 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009spd....40.2005h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, SPD meeting #40, #20.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.853

Physics

Scientific paper

Both theoretical arguments and observational results indicate that return-current losses can have a significant impact on electrons accelerated in solar flares. To understand the impact of return-current losses on the hard X-ray emission from flares, it is important to determine how these losses change the electron distribution function with distance from the acceleration region. It is also important to establish semi-quantitative results for estimating the impact of the losses. I present analytic solutions for return-current losses alone. These solutions show, for example, that return-current losses are not sensitive to plasma density, but are sensitive to plasma temperature and the low-energy cutoff of the nonthermal electron distribution. Plasma heating can be substantial in the coronal part of the flare loop before the nonthermal electron distribution is significantly altered. In a 1-D model, before the electrons reach the collisional thick-target region of the flare loop, an injected power-law electron distribution with a low-energy cutoff maintains that structure, but with a higher cutoff energy and a flat energy distribution below the cutoff energy. These and additional results will be presented and compared with existing numerical simulations.
This work is supported by NASA's Heliophysics Guest Investigator Program and the RHESSI Project.

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