1 research outputs found
Muon excess at sea level from solar flares in association with the Fermi GBM spacecraft detector
This paper presents results of an ongoing survey on the associations between
muon excesses at ground level registered by the Tupi telescopes and transient
solar events, two solar flares whose gamma-ray and X-ray emissions were
reported by, respectively, the Fermi GBM and the GOES 14. We show that solar
flares of small scale, those with prompt X-ray emission classified by GOES as
C-Class (power to W m at 1 AU) may give rise to muon
excess probably associated with solar protons and ions emitted by the flare and
arriving at the Earth as a coherent particle pulse. The Tupi telescopes are
within the central region of the South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA), which allows
particle detectors to achieve a low rigidity of response to primary and
secondary charged particles ( GV). Here we argue for the possibility
of a "scale-free" energy distribution of particles accelerated by solar flares.
Large and small scale flares have the same energy spectrum up to energies
exceeding the pion production, the difference between them is only the
intensity. If this hypothesis is correct, the Tupi telescope is registering
muons produced by protons (ions) whose energy corresponds to the tail of the
spectrum. Consequently the energy distribution of the emitted protons has to be
a power law spectrum, since power law distributions are characterized as scale
free distributions. The Tupi events give support to this conjecture.Comment: 24 pages, 10 figure