Simulation of Ionospheric E-Region Plasma Turbulence with a Massively Parallel Hybrid PIC/Fluid Code

Abstract:

The Farley-Buneman (FB) and gradient drift (GD) instabilities are plasma instabilities that occur at roughly 100 km in the equatorial E-region ionosphere. They develop when ion-neutral collisions dominate ion motion while electron motion is affected by both electron-neutral collisions and the background magnetic field. GD drift waves grow when the background density gradient and electric field are aligned; FB waves grow when the background electric field causes electrons to E × B drift with a speed slightly larger than the ion acoustic speed. Theory predicts that FB and GD turbulence should develop in the same plasma volume when GD waves create a perturbation electric field that exceeds the threshold value for FB turbulence. However, ionospheric radars, which regularly observe meter-scale irregularities associated with FB turbulence, must infer kilometer-scale GD dynamics rather than observe them directly. Numerical simulations have been unable to simultaneously resolve GD and FB structure. We present results from a parallelized hybrid simulation that uses a particle-in-cell (PIC) method for ions while modeling electrons as an inertialess, quasi-neutral fluid. This approach allows us to reach length scales of hundreds of meters to kilometers with sub-meter resolution, but requires solving a large linear system derived from an elliptic PDE that depends on plasma density, ion flux, and electron parameters. We solve the resultant linear system at each time step via the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computing (PETSc). We compare results of simulated FB turbulence from this model to results from a thoroughly tested PIC code and describe progress toward the first simultaneous simulations of FB and GD instabilities. This model has immediate applications to radar observations of the E-region ionosphere, as well as potential applications to the F-region ionosphere and the chromosphere of the Sun.