Measuring proton energies and fluxes using EIT (SOHO) CCD areas outside the solar disk images

Abstract

An indirect proton flux measuring tool based on discrimination of the energy deposited by protons in 128 x 128 pixel EIT CCD areas outside the solar disk images is presented. Single pixel intensity events are converted into proton incident energy flux using modeled energy deposition curves for angles of incidence 60 deg in four EIT spatial areas with different proton stopping power. The extracted proton flux is corrected for both the loss of one-pixel events in the range of angles of incidence as well as for the contribution to the single pixel events resulting from scattered middle-energy protons (low-energy or high-energy particles are stopped by the EIT components or pass through them, accordingly). A simple geometrical approach was found and applied to correct for a non-unique relation between the proton-associated CCD output signal and the incident proton energy. With this geometrical approximation four unique proton incident energy ranges were determined as 45--49, 145--154, 297--335, and 390--440 MeV. The indirect proton flux measuring tool has been tested by comparing Solar Energetic Particles (SEP) flux temporal profiles extracted from the EIT CCD frames and downloaded from the GOES database for the Bastille Day (BD) of 2000 July 14 and the more recent 2005 January 20 events. The SEP flux temporal profiles and proton spectra extracted from the EIT in the relatively narrow energy ranges between 45 and 440 MeV reported here are consistent with the related GOES profiles. The four additional EIT extracted ranges provide higher energy resolution of the SEP data.