The Formation of a Magnetosphere with Implicit Particle-in-Cell Simulations

Vaivads, A.; Venčels, Juris; Amaya, Jorge; Divin, Andrey; Laure, Erwin; Lapenta, Giovanni

doi:10.1016/j.procs.2015.05.288

Cited by 25 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…As an example of these simulations, we carried out a three-dimensional simulation of a magnetosphere. The simulation setup, parameters, and main results are reported in Peng et al (2015b). In this simulation, the solar wind is subsonic as the solar wind velocity is lower than the magnetosonic Mach number.…”

Section: Dipolar Mini-magnetospherementioning

confidence: 99%

Magnetic Null Points in Kinetic Simulations of Space Plasmas

Olshevsky

Deca

Divin

et al. 2016

ApJ

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We present a systematic attempt to study magnetic null points and the associated magnetic energy conversion in kinetic particle-in-cell simulations of various plasma configurations. We address three-dimensional simulations performed with the semi-implicit kinetic electromagnetic code iPic3D in different setups: variations of a Harris current sheet, dipolar and quadrupolar magnetospheres interacting with the solar wind,and a relaxing turbulent configuration with multiple null points. Spiral nulls are more likely created in space plasmas: in all our simulations except lunar magnetic anomaly (LMA) and quadrupolar mini-magnetosphere the number of spiral nulls prevails over the number of radial nulls by a factor of 3-9. We show that often magnetic nulls do not indicate the regions of intensive energy dissipation. Energy dissipation events caused by topological bifurcations at radial nulls are rather rare and short-lived. The so-called X-lines formed by the radial nulls in the Harris current sheet and LMA simulations are rather stable and do not exhibit any energy dissipation. Energy dissipation is more powerful in the vicinity of spiral nulls enclosed by magnetic flux ropes with strong currents at their axes (their crosssections resemble 2D magnetic islands). These null lines reminiscent of Z-pinches efficiently dissipate magnetic energy due to secondary instabilities such as the two-stream or kinking instability, accompanied by changes in magnetic topology. Current enhancements accompanied by spiral nulls may signal magnetic energy conversion sites in the observational data.

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Section: Dipolar Mini-magnetospherementioning

confidence: 99%

Magnetic Null Points in Kinetic Simulations of Space Plasmas

Olshevsky

Deca

Divin

et al. 2016

ApJ

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“…Other approaches that do not follow the framework approach of coupling models that implement different, domain-relevant physics (Baker et al, 2009;Tóth et al, 2005) include the Vlasiator hybrid-Vlasov model (von Alfthan et al, 2014), which evolves the ion distribution function while treating the electrons as a fluid, other kinetic-fluid modeling approaches (Kolobov & Deluzet, 2019;Roytershteyn & Delzanno, 2018), and particle-in-cell models (Yang et al, 2016). Due to computational expense-or more precisely, the availability of computational resources to researchers-these kinetic simulations are currently limited to either small domains (Peng et al, 2015) or to two spatial dimensions (Innocenti et al, 2017;Jarvinen et al, 2018). The next generation of NSWP models should leverage parallelization across heterogeneous systems (Innocenti et al, 2017).…”

Section: Computational Approaches Resources and Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Challenges and Opportunities in Magnetospheric Space Weather Prediction

Morley

2020

Space Weather

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Space Weather is the study of the dynamics of the coupled Solar‐Terrestrial environment, as these dynamics impact technological systems and human activity. This paper reviews a selection of the advances, challenges, and new opportunities for magnetospheric space weather, and while the focus is on specific phenomena, many other aspects of space weather will have similar challenges and needs. As a scientific field with direct applications, the field of space weather is partly driven by imperatives from both policy and operations. We provide an introduction to some of the context in which the field exists and discuss how this might shape future developments and norms within the space weather enterprise. We briefly examine benchmarking, as a policy and operationally driven activity, as it provides immediate societal relevance and an opportunity to stretch scientific understanding. As numerical space weather prediction now becomes routine, and exascale computing is in the near future, we identify challenges relating to computational expense and big data, capturing and accounting for uncertainties, and specification of boundary conditions. Here, as with the observations supporting numerical space weather prediction, the key challenge lies in extending the lead time of predictions. We also discuss the role of data, particularly in regard to model validation and empirical modeling. Due to the growing societal impact of space weather, we also examine the relationships between space weather and its terrestrial counterpart and look at the importance of continuous evaluation, monitoring progress in predictive capability, and communication with researchers, forecasters, and end users.

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“…Outgassing is performed by injecting new plasma particles from the "surface" of the comet. A spherical shell 5dx thick is defined inside the comet and acts as buffer zone similarly to buffer zones created for enabling open boundary conditions [20]. At each time step, new computational particles are created randomly and uniformly distributed inside this spherical shell with particle density n 0e = n 0i = 1.0.…”

Section: Simulation Setupmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first fully kinetic model of a cometary induced magnetosphere was presented by Deca et al [18] using the iPIC3D code [19,20], the authors have shown that the dynamics of ions and electrons in the atmosphere of a weakly outgassing comet could be represented, to first order, in terms of the four-fluid system with solar wind ions, solar wind electrons, cometary ions and cometary electrons each treated by separate fluid equations. Differently from this previous work, we develop an alternative approach for modeling cometary interaction with solar wind using iPIC3D.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Plasma Dynamics in Cometary Environment

Sishtla

Olshevsky

Chien

et al. 2019

J. Phys.: Conf. Ser.

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We perform and analyze global Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations of the interaction between solar wind and an outgassing comet with the goal of studying the plasma kinetic dynamics of a cometary environment. To achieve this, we design and implement a new numerical method in the iPIC3D code to model outgassing from the comet: new plasma particles are ejected from the comet "surface" at each computational cycle. Our simulations show that a bow shock is formed as a result of the interaction between solar wind and outgassed particles. The analysis of distribution functions for the PIC simulations shows that at the bow shock part of the incoming solar wind, ions are reflected while electrons are heated. This work attempts to reveal kinetic effects in the atmosphere of an outgassing comet using a fully kinetic Particlein-Cell model. arXiv:1901.09638v1 [physics.space-ph]

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The Formation of a Magnetosphere with Implicit Particle-in-Cell Simulations

Cited by 25 publications

References 8 publications

Magnetic Null Points in Kinetic Simulations of Space Plasmas

Magnetic Null Points in Kinetic Simulations of Space Plasmas

Challenges and Opportunities in Magnetospheric Space Weather Prediction

Particle-in-Cell Simulations of Plasma Dynamics in Cometary Environment

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