During its first six years of operation, the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has detected >30 MeV gamma-ray emission from more than 40 solar flares, nearly a factor of 10 more than those detected by EGRET. These include detections of impulsive and sustained emissions, extending up to 20 hours in the case of the 2012 March 7 X-class flares. We will present an overview of solar flare detections with LAT, highlighting recent results and surprising features, including the detection of >100 MeV emission associated with flares located behind the limb. Such flares may shed new light on the relationship between the sites of particle acceleration and gamma-ray emission.
@article{arxiv.1502.03895,
title = {Shedding new light on the Sun with the Fermi LAT},
author = {N. Omodei and V. Petrosian and W. Liu and F. Rubio da Costa and Q. Chen and M. Pesce-Rollins and E. Grove and F. Longo},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.03895},
year = {2019}
}