  A considerable fraction of the energy in a solar flare is released as
suprathermal electrons; such electrons play a major role in energy deposition
in the ambient atmosphere and hence the atmospheric response to flare heating.
Historically the transport of these particles has been approximated through a
deterministic approach in which first-order secular energy loss to electrons in
the ambient target is treated as the dominant effect, with second-order
diffusive terms (in both energy and angle) being generally either treated as a
small correction or neglected. However, it has recently been pointed out that
while neglect of diffusion in energy may indeed be negligible, diffusion in
angle is of the same order as deterministic scattering and hence must be
included. Here we therefore investigate the effect of angular scattering on the
energy deposition profile in the flaring atmosphere. A relatively simple
compact expression for the spatial distribution of energy deposition into the
ambient plasma is presented and compared with the corresponding deterministic
result. For unidirectional injection there is a significant shift in heating
from the lower corona to the upper corona; this shift is much smaller for
isotropic injection. We also compare the heating profiles due to return current
Ohmic heating in the diffusional and deterministic models.
