Simulation of Magnetic Reconnection in Magnetotail by Interlocking Particle-in-Cell and Magnetohydrodynamics on Hierarchical Mesh

Abstract:

Magnetic reconnection is a multi-scale phenomenon. Both macroscopic plasma dynamics and microscopic particle kinetics are important there. Numerically, particle methods can deal with micro-scale kinetics, but they generally need much computational resources if one tries to calculate macro-scale by them. On the other hand, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) can solve macro-scale dynamics efficiently, but it cannot reproduce the phenomenon without an appropriate extension. Usami et al. (2008, 2014) developed a code that uses both Particle-in-Cell (PIC) method and MHD. They divided a computational box into three domains; a PIC domain, a MHD domain and an interaction domain. Both PIC and MHD are calculated in the interaction domain and interlocked. They localized the PIC domain and enabled efficient implementation of simulations. In our previous study, we extended Usami's MHD domain to a hierarchical mesh that is controlled by Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) technique (Ogawa et al. 2014), aiming to connect the local PIC calculation with a global MHD simulation.
In this study, we apply the code to a simulation of magnetic reconnection in magnetotail. Outer boundary of the MHD domain is decided by data of another global MHD simulation of Earth's magnetosphere, and it leads to magnetic reconnection in the PIC domain. We will describe our method and show results in our poster.

This work was supported by JSPS Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) 23340182.