Radio blips and hard X-rays in solar flares

The properties of short, narrow-band spikes occurring in groups at decimetric wavelengths have been extensively analyzed. The bursts, termed blips in the literature, have been found to appear in the impulsive phase of flares. They are associated with hard X-ray emission in 40 percent of all cases with simultaneous coverage. The correspondence between blips and X-ray spikes is generally not one-to-one, blips being more numerous than X-ray spikes. In some cases, however, close correlations between single events have been found. Blips have been discovered to drift in frequency and to decay in time similarly to type III bursts at lower frequency. They also resemble type III bursts in polarization. An analysis of starting frequencies, however, clearly shows that blips and type III bursts belong to different statistical populations. The narrow bandwidth of blips, the major qualitative difference with respect to type III bursts, suggests that blips are the signature of electron beams which either decay rapidly or have a locally enhanced emission due to the presence of some low-frequency wave. Blips have been shown to be an impulsive phase phenomenon occurring at densities of one to three billion per cu cm in the low corona.