Description
Solar flares are explosive releases of magnetic energy stored in the solar corona, driven by magnetic reconnection. These events accelerate particles, generating hard X-ray emissions. However, the energy transfer process remains poorly constrained, with competing theories proposing different acceleration mechanisms, including magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence. We investigate electron acceleration and transport in flaring coronal loops by solving a time-dependent Fokker–Planck equation. Our model incorporates transient acceleration, simulating the effects of impulsive energy input, such as from a pulse or wave train, to emulate the dynamics of transient reconnection processes (e.g., oscillatory reconnection) at the loop apex. We compute the density-weighted electron flux, a diagnostic directly comparable to observed X-ray emissions, across the energy and spatial domains from the corona to the chromosphere. Additionally, we measure the electron response time scale, which is the time that electrons take to move from a steady energy level to another energy level after being accelerated by a pulse. We conduct a detailed parameter study to assess how variations in the acceleration region’s properties influence the results under a turbulent acceleration model. Our findings reveal that the density-weighted electron flux largely depends on the pulse shape used to accelerate electrons at the loop top. Furthermore, the response timescale for a flaring loop at 20 MK is less than 4 seconds, shorter than the temporal resolution of some instruments. We also demonstrate that the electron response delay is energy-dependent, increasing gradually for higher-energy electrons.
