SH33C-08
Radio Emissions from Plasma with Electron Kappa-Distributions
Abstract:
Gregory Fleishman (New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, USA)Alexey Kuznetsov (Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Irkutsk, Russia),
Currently there is a concern about the ability of the classical thermal (Maxwellian) distribution to describe quasisteady-state plasma in the solar atmosphere, including active regions. In particular, other distributions have been proposed to better fit observations, for example, kappa-distributions. If present, these distributions will generate radio emissions with different observable properties compared with the classical gyroresonance (GR) or free–free emission, which implies a way of remotely detecting these kappa distributions in the radio observations. Here we present analytically derived GR and free–free emissivities and absorption coefficients for the kappa-distribution, and discuss their properties, which are in fact remarkably different from the classical Maxwellian plasma. In particular, the radio brightness temperature from a gyrolayer increases with the optical depth τ for kappa-distribution. This property has a remarkable consequence allowing a straightforward observational test: the GR radio emission from the non-Maxwellian distributions is supposed to be noticeably polarized even in the optically thick case, where the emission would have strictly zero polarization in the case of Maxwellian plasma. This offers a way of remote probing the plasma distribution in astrophysical sources, including solar active regions as a vivid example. In this report, we present analytical formulae and computer codes to calculate the emission parameters. We simulate the gyroresonance emission under the conditions typical of the solar active regions and compare the results for different electron distributions. We discuss the implications of our findings for interpretation of radio observations.