Downflow Motions Associated with Impulsive Nonthermal Emissions Observed in the 2002 July 23 Solar Flare

A major breakthrough? The pioneering Yohkoh soft X-ray telescope had discovered downflows above arcade flares, termed "supra-arcade downflows" with a SAD three-letter acronym (TLA). These flows, suggestive of reconnection outflows in the CSHKP morphology, mainly appeared to be a gradual-phase phenomenon. But the observations reported here, based on RHESSI data for the flare SOL2002-07-23, have now been shown to occur in the impulsive phase as well. Moreover the timing of the hard X-ray bursts appears to match the downflow occurrences. All hail RHESSI! Of course, the authors of this paper wish to embellish the standard CSHKP theory with this phenomenon, even though it was not predicted by that theory, in which the reconnection exhaust flow should be much faster. Accordingly the authors cautiously say that the outflows may be "correlated with" the reconnection outflows, if that is not what they are exactly.