SPRG Seminars

November 18, 2008:

"Stochastic Acceleration by Turbulence in Solar Flares: Enrichment of 3He and Heavy Ions in SEPs"

Vahe' Petrosian, Stanford University

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There is growing evidence that stochastic acceleration by plasma waves and turbulence is the most likely mechanism for heating and acceleration in solar flares. This model can explain many radiative features of flares observed by Yohkoh and RHESSI, and some of the unusual enrichments of 3He and heavy ions seen in the Solar Energetic Particle events. I will give a brief description of the model and its prediction on flare radiation and then describe some of our recent work which explains not only the cause of the observed enrichments, but can also fit the spectra and reproduce the relative distributions of the fluences of 3He and 4He obtained from a large sample of SEP events.