Particle-in-Cell Simulations of the Magnetosphere Dynamics with iPIC3D

Abstract:

We present the results of global Particle-in-Cell (PIC) simulations of the interaction between the solar wind and a magnetosphere. We focus our study on the analysis of the kinetic electron and ion structures in the bow shock and magnetic reconnection regions. We implemented a PIC code, called iPIC3D, that discretizes and solves the governing equations implicitly in time. This numerical scheme allows us to use time step values that are comparable to the plasma period and grid spacings that are 10-100 Debye lengths still retaining the numerical stability. For this reason, implicit PIC methods are ideal to bridge microscopic kinetic and macroscopic fluid scales. We address the problem of modeling multi-scale phenomena during the formation of a magnetosphere by implementing new algorithmic improvements of the implicit PIC method and new open boundary conditions to model the inflow and outflow of plasma in/out to the simulation box.