Electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations on magnetic reconnection with adaptive mesh refinement

Fujimoto, Keizo; Sydora, R. D.

doi:10.1016/j.cpc.2008.02.010

Cited by 23 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…11,33 The present simulation shows that the kink mode still survives even when the plasma sheet plasma around the X-line is completely replaced by the background lobe plasma. The spatial resolution is efficiently enhanced by using the adaptive mesh refinement ͑AMR͒, which enables us to perform effective high-resolution simulations of magnetic reconnection by allocating fine cells only around the central current sheet.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 58%

“…11,33 The AMR technique subdivides and removes computational cells in accordance with refinement criteria so as to efficiently enhance local spatial resolution dynamically in time. 11,33 The AMR technique subdivides and removes computational cells in accordance with refinement criteria so as to efficiently enhance local spatial resolution dynamically in time.…”

Section: Simulation Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Fast magnetic reconnection in a kinked current sheet

Fujimoto

2009

Physics of Plasmas

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Magnetic reconnection processes in a kinked current sheet are investigated using three-dimensional electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations in a large system where both the tearing and kink modes are able to be captured. The spatial resolution is efficiently enhanced using the adaptive mesh refinement and particle splitting-coalescence method. The kink mode scaled by the current sheet width such as kyL∼1 is driven by the ions that are accelerated due to the reconnection electric field in the ion-scale diffusion region. Although the kink mode deforms the current sheet structure drastically, the gross rate of reconnection is almost identical to the case without the kink mode and fast magnetic reconnection is achieved. The magnetic dissipation mechanism is, however, found very different between the cases with and without the kink mode. The kink mode broadens the current sheet width and reduces the electron flow velocity, so that the electron inertia resistivity is decreased. Nevertheless, anomalous dissipation through the electron thermalization compensates the decrease in the inertia resistivity so as to keep a high reconnection rate. This suggests that the electron dynamics in the electron diffusion region is automatically adjusted so as to generate sufficient dissipation for fast magnetic reconnection. The electron thermalization occurs effectively because the electron meandering scale along the current sheet is comparable to the wavelength of the kink mode. On the other hand, two-dimensional simulations in the plane orthogonal to the magnetic field shows that in higher mass ratio cases with mi/me>100 the electron thermalization is caused due to a hybrid-scale mode with wavelength intermediate between the ion and electron inertia lengths kyλiλe∼1 rather than the large-scale kink mode with kyL∼1, because the electron meandering scale is shortened as the mass ratio increases.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 58%

Section: Simulation Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast magnetic reconnection in a kinked current sheet

Fujimoto

2009

Physics of Plasmas

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“…In the second case, the moving mesh adaptation (MMA) method [33] is obtained. In PIC methods the AMR approach has been recently considered carefully [34,35]. The approach followed here is instead a variant of the MMA approach [33].…”

Section: Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

DEMOCRITUS: An adaptive particle in cell (PIC) code for object-plasma interactions

Lapenta¹

2011

Journal of Computational Physics

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“…Fully implicit [11,12] and semi-implicit algorithms, either Implicit Moment Method (IMM) [13][14][15] or direct implicit [16][17][18][19][20], allow to use ion-scale resolutions rather than satisfying the strict stability constraints of explicit codes (although, if ion rather than electron scales are resolved, electron scale processes are averaged out). With adaptive PIC simulations [21,22], one can use locally increased resolutions, where needed, and save computing resources with respect to simulating the entire domain with the highest spatial and temporal resolution required.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%