Gamma-ray spectroscopy provides a wealth of information about acceler- ated particles in solar flares, as well as the ambient medium with which these energetic particles interact. The neutron capture line （2.223 MeV）, the strongest in the solar gamma-ray spectrum, forms in the deep atmosphere. The energy of these photons can be reduced via Compton scattering. With the fully relativistic GEANT4 toolkit, we have carried out Monte Carlo simulations of the transport of a neutron capture line in solar flares, and applied them to the flare that occurred on 2005 January 20 （X7.1/2B）, one of the most powerful gamma-ray flares observed by RHESSI during the 23rd solar cycle. By comparing the fitting results of different models with and without Compton scattering of the neutron capture line, we find that when including the Compton scat- tering for the neutron capture line, the observed gamma-ray spectrum can be repro- duced by a population of accelerated particles with a very hard spectrum （s ≤ 2.3）. The Compton effect of a 2.223 MeV line on the spectra is therefore proven to be sig- nificant, which influences the time evolution of the neutron capture line flux as well. The study also suggests that the mean vertical depth for neutron capture in hydrogen for this event is about 8 g cm-2.
The power-law frequency distributions of the peak flux of solar flare X-ray emission have been studied extensively and attributed to a system having self-organized criticality （SOC）. In this paper, we first show that, so long as the shape of the normalized light curve is not correlated with the peak flux, the flux histogram of solar flares also follows a power-law distribution with the same spectral index as the power- law frequency distribution of the peak flux, which may partially explain why power-law distributions are ubiquitous in the Universe. We then show that the spectral indexes of the histograms of soft X-ray fluxes observed by GOES satellites in two different energy channels are different： the higher energy channel has a harder distribution than the lower energy channel, which challenges the universal power-law distribution predicted by SOC models and implies a very soft distribution of thermal energy content of plasmas probed by the GOES satellites. The temperature （T） distribution, on the other hand, approaches a power-law dis- tribution with an index of 2 for high values of T. Hence the application of SOC models to the statistical properties of solar flares needs to be revisited.
You-Ping LiLi FengPing ZhangSi-Ming LiuWei-Qun Gan
