Particle Acceleration in Stressed Coronal Magnetic Fields

Abstract

This Letter presents an analysis of particle acceleration in a model of the complex magnetic field environment in the flaring solar corona. A slender flux tube, initially in hydrodynamic equilibrium, is stressed by random photospheric motions. A three-dimensional MHD code is used to follow the stochastic development of transient current sheets. These processes generate a highly fragmented electric field, through which particles are tracked using a relativistic test particle code. It is shown that both ions and electrons are accelerated readily to relativistic energies in times of order 10-2 s for electrons and 10-1 s for protons forming power-law distributions in energy.