Solar Impulsive Electron Events and RHESSI Hard X-ray Emission

Solar impulsive electron events (SIEEs) are often related to radio type III bursts and are thought to be accelerated in the solar corona. It is therefore expected that they should produce X-rays through bremmsstrahlung whose flux is dependent on the height of the accelerator. Previous studies have shown that low energy SEIIs appear to be the source of type III radio bursts. The Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) provides unique sensitivity in the 3-15 keV energy range, with an effective area ~100 times larger than similar past instruments. RHESSI is therefore uniquely suited to study small events. The 3-D Plasma and Energetic Particle Instrument (3DP) on the WIND spacecraft measures in-situ energetic particles with energies from ~0.4 to 300 keV. WIND has observed a total of 547 SIEEs since the launch of RHESSI. A total of 303 of these events have simultaneous RHESSI observations and 444 events show an associated type III radio burst. We concentrate on low energy events as observed by 3DP (SEIIs energy < 20 keV) with an associated radio type III and simulatenous RHESSI observations. We find a total of 68 such events. We compare the X-ray producing and SEII particle populations and the expected to observed X-ray flux based on the acceleration height derived from the starting frequency of the metric type III observations. This work was supported by GSRP Grant NNM-05ZA12H and NASA contract NAS5-98033.