Energy‐dependent Charge States and Their Connection with Ion Abundances in Impulsive Solar Energetic Particle Events

Abstract

Impulsive solar energetic particle (SEP) events show substantial enhancements of heavy ions and -->3He over the composition in the Sun's atmosphere. Mass per charge dependent acceleration mechanisms have been proposed to account for this preferential acceleration. However, a problem emerged for all the preferential acceleration models with the measurement of ionization states near 1 MeV nucleon−1, which showed that ions from C to Mg are fully stripped, a challenge that had been recognized early on. Since all models relied on differences in the charge-to-mass ratio to enable preferential acceleration, the proposed mechanisms were incompatible with this observation. Recent observations of the ionic charge states at lower energies have revealed a dependence on energy, with the charge states decreasing for lower energy ions. This raises the possibility that the low-energy charge states reflect the plasma conditions at the acceleration site, while the high-energy charge states are due to stripping low in the solar corona. In a survey of impulsive events we show that the increase of the Fe charge states with energy is highly significant for the sample of events and thus most likely a general feature of impulsive events. To see whether there is a connection between the enhancements and charge states, we extended the ACE SEPICA charge-state observations to lower energies and combined them with the ion fluxes from ACE ULEIS for impulsive events observed between 1997 and 2000. We find a positive correlation between the abundance ratios and the charge states at low energy, while the charge states at the highest energy do not demonstrate such dependence. This supports the idea that the higher mass particles are preferentially accelerated before being stripped.