Plasma Heating in the Very Early and Decay Phases of Solar Flares

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the energy budgets of two single-loop solar flares under the assumption that non-thermal electrons (NTEs) are the only source of plasma heating during all phases of both events. The flares were observed by RHESSI and GOES on 2002 September 20 and 2002 March 17, respectively. For both investigated flares we derived the energy fluxes contained in NTE beams from the RHESSI observational data constrained by observed GOES light curves. We showed that energy delivered by NTEs was fully sufficient to fulfill the energy budgets of the plasma during the pre-heating and impulsive phases of both flares as well as during the decay phase of one of them. We concluded that in the case of the investigated flares there was no need to use any additional ad hoc heating mechanisms other than heating by NTEs.