Did the 2000 November 8 solar flare accelerate protons to >=40 GeV?
Abstract
It has been reported that a 5.7sigma directional muon excess coincident with the 2000 July 14 solar flare was registered by the L3 precision muon spectrometer [Ruiguang Wang, Astroparticle Phys., 31(2009) 149]. Using a same analysis method and similar criteria of event selection, we have analyzed the L3 precision muon spectrometer data during November 2000. The result shows that a 4.7sigma muon excess appeared at a time coincident with the solar flare of 8 of November 2000. This muon excess corresponds to above 40 GeV primary protons which came from a sky cell of solid angle 0.048 sr. The probability of being a background fluctuation is estimated to be about 0.1%. It has been convinced that solar protons could be accelerated to tens of GeV in those Class X solar flares which usually arose solar cosmic ray ground level enhancement (GLE) events. However, whether a Class M solar flare like the non-GLE event of 8 November 2000 may also accelerate solar protons to such high energies? It is interesting and noteworthy.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1708.02474,
title = {Did the 2000 November 8 solar flare accelerate protons to >=40 GeV?},
author = {R. G. Wang and L. K. Ding and Y. Q. Ma and X. H. Ma and Q. Q. Zhu and C. G. Yang and H. H. Kuang and Z. Q. Yu and Z. G. Yao and Y. P. Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1708.02474},
year = {2017}
}