Magnetic field fossilization and tail reconfiguration in Titan's plasma environment during a magnetopause passage: 3D adaptive hybrid code simulations

A.I.K.E.F.: Adaptive hybrid model for space plasma simulations

“…Several different scales are involved in this type of interaction: while small fossil field regions inside Titan's ionosphere are of few hundreds kilometer size the complex tail reconfiguration process occurs on scales of many thousand kilometers. For the first time the high spatial resolution and improved numerical schema enabled the ability to model both, field fossilization [23] and tail reconfiguration [26] during a magnetopause passage within a single simulation. In the following we shall point out some numerical features with relation to the current article.…”

“…In the following we shall point out some numerical features with relation to the current article. However, for details of the involved physics we refer the reader to Müller et al [22].…”

“…For instance fossil fields at Titan are strongly localized [23,6] and require high resolution just for certain regions close to the obstacles surface.…”

“…A detailed description of the code parallelization and analysis of its scaling behavior are given in Section 6. During and after the implementation of A.I.K.E.F., the code has been intensively tested. The results form the major part of this article and are summarized in Section 7, that is tests of uniform meshes in Section 7.1, conservation properties during particle refinement in Section 7.2, wave dispersion relation and test for reflexion at refinement boundaries in Section 7.3, propagation characteristics of standing waves in Section 7.4, comparison of high resolution uniform mesh simulation and adaptive mesh simulation in Section 7.5, comparison of spacecraft observations and simulation results in Section 7.6 and finally in Section 7.7 we shall point out the ability to model field fossilization in real time, that has been observed by the Cassini spacecraft mission [23,6]. The article closes with an outlook and summary in Section 8.…”

The orientation of Titan’s dayside ionosphere and its effects on Titan’s plasma interaction

“…Self-consistent hybrid simulations (kinetic ions, fluid electrons) have been carried to account for the ion gyroradii effects near Titan (e.g. Brecht et Ledvina et al, 2004a;Sillanpää et al, 2006;Simon et al, 2006;Modolo et al, 2007;Müller et al, 2010). The major limitation to the hybrid simulation performed to date has been their lack of any description of the ionosphere.…”