Stochastic Acceleration of $^3$He and $^4$He in Solar Flares by Parallel Propagating Plasma Waves: General Results

We study the acceleration in solar flares of $^3$He and $^4$He from a thermal background by parallel propagating plasma waves with a general broken power-law spectrum that takes into account the turbulence generation processes at large scales and the thermal damping effects at small scales. The exact dispersion relation for a cold plasma is used to describe the relevant wave modes. Because low-energy $α$-particles only interact with small scale waves in the $^4$He-cyclotron branch, where the wave frequencies are below the $α$-particle gyro-frequency, their pitch angle averaged acceleration time is at least one order of magnitude longer than that of $^3$He ions, which mostly resonate with relatively higher frequency waves in the proton-cyclotron (PC) branch. The $α$-particle acceleration rate starts to approach that of $^3$He beyond a few tens of keV nucleon$^{-1}$, where $α$-particles can also interact with long wavelength waves in the PC branch. However, the $^4$He acceleration rate is always smaller than that of $^3$He. Consequently, the acceleration of $^4$He is suppressed significantly at low energies, and the spectrum of the accelerated $α$-particles is always softer than that of $^3$He. The model gives reasonable account of the observed low-energy $^3$He and $^4$He fluxes and spectra in the impulsive solar energetic particle events observed with the {\it Advanced Composition Explorer}. We explore the model parameter space to show how observations may be used to constrain the model.

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