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G. D. Holman (NASA/GSFC)
It has been suggested that the electron distribution in the solar corona may be well represented by a ``kappa'' distribution function (Owocki & Scudder 1983, ApJ 270, 758; Scudder 1992, ApJ 398, 319). The kappa distribution, which approaches a Maxwellian as kappa approaches infinity, simulates a thermal core with a power-law tail of energetic particles. I derive a relativistic generalization of the kappa distribution function and compute the gyrosynchrotron radio emission from it for typical non-flaring active region conditions. I find that the computed radio brightness temperature exceeds observations for all values of kappa less than ~10.
The gyrosynchrotron code used for these computations will be available as part of the modeling package being developed for the HESSI project. This work is supported in part by the NASA Sun-Earth Connection SR&T Program in Solar Physics.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: holman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov