Wednesday

Solar active regions are sites of complex magnetic activity and the origin of transient events like flares, where magnetic energy is released and dissipated in the solar atmosphere. Flares are efficient particle accelerators, and prime laboratories for studying acceleration processes in astrophysics, with a high fraction of the released energy being carried by energetic particles. Over the last decade, our understanding of flare particle acceleration has been enhanced by multi-wavelength observations from X-rays to (E)UV to radio. However, many questions remain about how and where energetic particles are accelerated, and how different plasma environments (e.g., collisions, turbulence) affect the transport and observed properties of energetic particles. We anticipate that proposed missions with direct X-ray imaging capabilities (e.g. FOXSI) could probe high energy processes in active regions in unprecedented detail, while data from a new generation of observatories (e.g. Solar Probe/Solar Orbiter) will help to understand the connection between energetic particles at the Sun and those measured in situ in the heliosphere.