Kappa distribution model for hard X-ray coronal sources of solar flares

Abstract

Solar flares produce hard X-ray emission, the photon spectrum of which is often represented by a combination of thermal and power-law distributions. However, the estimates of the number and total energy of non-thermal electrons are sensitive to the determination of the power-law cutoff energy. Here, we revisit an "above-the-loop" coronal source observed by RHESSI on 2007 December 31 and show that a kappa distribution model can also be used to fit its spectrum. Because the kappa distribution has a Maxwellian-like core in addition to a high-energy power-law tail, the emission measure and temperature of the instantaneous electrons can be derived without assuming the cutoff energy. Moreover, the non-thermal fractions of electron number/energy densities can be uniquely estimated because they are functions of only the power-law index. With the kappa distribution model, we estimated that the total electron density of the coronal source region was ∼2.4 × 1010 cm-3. We also estimated without assuming the source volume that a moderate fraction (∼20%) of electrons in the source region was non-thermal and carried ∼52% of the total electron energy. The temperature was 28 MK, and the power-law index δ of the electron density distribution was -4.3. These results are compared to the conventional power-law models with and without a thermal core component. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved..