Abstract
Magnetic reconnection is commonly accepted to play a key role in flare energy release, but only poor information about the main characteristics of this process is available so far. An intrinsic feature of reconnection is plasma density enhancement in current sheets. A unique method to detect this effect is provided by analysis of drifting bursts, whose emission frequency is close to the local Langmuir frequency or its harmonics. With this purpose, we analyze a series of several tens of drifting microwave bursts during the 30 March 2001 flare. The burst drift rates range from −10 to 20 GHz s−1. Using one-dimensional scans recorded with the SSRT interferometer at two different frequencies near 5.7 GHz, we have measured relative positions of burst sources and their velocities along a flare loop revealed from soft X-ray and extreme-ultraviolet images. It is argued that the contribution of the increasing density effect into the observed frequency drift rates is about 6 GHz s−1, which is shown to be consistent with theoretical models of magnetic reconnection with reasonable boundary conditions.
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