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Description
One of the key problems in solar flare physics is the determination of the low-energy cut-off: the value that determines the energy of nonthermal electrons and hence flare energetics. We discuss different approaches to determine the low-energy cut-off in the spectrum of accelerated electrons: (I) the total electron number model, (II) the time-of-flight model (based on the equivalence of the time-of-flight and the collisional deflection time), (III) the warm target model of Kontar et al., and (IV) the model of the spectral cross-over between thermal and nonthermal components. We find that the first three models are consistent with a low-energy cutoff with a mean value of ~10keV, while the cross-over model provides an upper limit for the low-energy cutoff with a mean value of ~21keV. Combining the first three models we find that the ratio of the nonthermal energy to the dissipated magnetic energy in solar flares has a mean value of qE=0.57{+/-}0.08, which is consistent with an earlier study based on the simplified approximation of the warm target model alone (qE=0.51{+/-}0.17). This study corroborates the self-consistency between three different low-energy cutoff models in the calculation of nonthermal flare energies.
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