Speaker
Description
First Name: William
Last Name: Ashfield
Affiliation: Southwest Research Institute
All Authors: William Ashfield, John Unverferth
Rapidly evolving spectral redshifts in flare ribbons have long served as a diagnostic for energy deposition during solar flares. Also known as chromospheric condensation, these downflows have also been observed with IRIS to exhibit quasi-periodic pulsations (QPPs), establishing a connection between chromospheric dynamics and periodic energy release. However, previous investigations of condensation using the PREFT flare code found that prolonged heating of the flare loop top produced only brief condensation episodes, challenging the notion that these signatures reflect the entire temporal evolution of energy release. In this work, we aim to address this simple question: Can repeated energy injection along a single 1D flare loop produce velocity oscillations in the lower solar atmosphere? Using both thermal conduction and electron-beam energy transfer models, we find that QPPs in condensation can arise depending on the frequency, duration, and modulated intensity of the heating input. In addition, we investigate synthetic hard and soft X-ray emission light curves and their ability to exhibit quasi-periodic behavior consistent with the imposed heating timescales. These results demonstrate that chromospheric QPPs can directly trace periodic energy release, providing an additional observational diagnostic for constraining the temporal characteristics of flare energy release.