Presentation #408.05 in the session High-energy Solar Investigations through Next-generation Remote Sensing: Spectroscopy, Imaging, and Beyond I.
A long-term goal of the heliophysics community is to understand solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and their space weather impacts. Radio observations are known to offer a wealth of unique tools for, e.g., measuring the rapidly evolving coronal magnetic field, tracing magnetic reconnection, and quantifying flare-accelerated nonthermal electrons. The radio diagnostic potential has not been fully appreciated until recently, when radio observing has been entering the era of broadband imaging spectroscopy. This technique works effectively as a slitless spectrograph but without any overlapping effects, which allows a spectrum to be derived from every pixel in the radio image for subsequent spectral analysis. However, current solar-dedicated instruments do not have sufficient dynamic range, bandwidth, and resolution to obtain detailed spectral diagnostics beyond a small region where the strongest flare emission is present. In this talk, I will demonstrate that a next-generation broadband radio heliograph with a dense u-v coverage, such as the FASR concept, can achieve full spectroscopy along with an imaging performance akin to an HDR camera (with a dynamic range up to ~10,000:1). Based on realistic flare simulations and radiation modeling, I will discuss how such superior spectral imaging capabilities can revolutionize the study of solar flares by accurately recovering key physical parameters over most of, if not the entire, flaring and non-flaring region.