K. Germaschewski

PERPENDICULAR ION HEATING BY LOW-FREQUENCY ALFVEN-WAVE TURBULENCE IN THE SOLAR WIND

We consider ion heating by turbulent Alfv?n waves (AWs) and kinetic Alfv?n waves (KAWs) with wavelengths (measured perpendicular to the magnetic field) that are comparable to the ion gyroradius and frequencies ? smaller than the ion cyclotron frequency ?. We focus on plasmas in which ? 1, where ? is the ratio of plasma pressure to magnetic pressure. As in previous studies, we find that when the turbulence amplitude exceeds a certain threshold, an ions orbit becomes chaotic. The ion then interacts stochastically with the time-varying electrostatic potential, and the ions energy undergoes a random walk. Using phenomenological arguments, we derive an analytic expression for the rates at which different ion species are heated, which we test by simulating test particles interacting with a spectrum of randomly phased AWs and KAWs. We find that the stochastic heating rate depends sensitively on the quantity ? = ?v ?/v ?, where v ? (v ?) is the component of the ion velocity perpendicular (parallel) to the background magnetic field B 0, and ?v ? (?B ?) is the rms amplitude of the velocity (magnetic-field) fluctuations at the gyroradius scale. In the case of thermal protons, when ? ?crit, where ?crit is a constant, a protons magnetic moment is nearly conserved and stochastic heating is extremely weak. However, when ?>?crit, the proton heating rate exceeds half the cascade power that would be present in strong balanced KAW turbulence with the same value of ?v ?, and magnetic-moment conservation is violated even when ? ?. For the random-phase waves in our test-particle simulations, ?crit = 0.19. For protons in low-? plasmas, ? ??1/2?B ?/B 0, and ? can exceed ?crit even when ?B ?/B 0 ?crit. The heating is anisotropic, increasing v 2 ? much more than v 2 ? when ? 1. (In contrast, at ? 1 Landau damping and transit-time damping of KAWs lead to strong parallel heating of protons.) At comparable temperatures, alpha particles and minor ions have larger values of ? than protons and are heated more efficiently as a result. We discuss the implications of our results for ion heating in coronal holes and the solar wind.

Filamentation instability of counterstreaming laser-driven plasmas.

Filamentation due to the growth of a Weibel-type instability was observed in the interaction of a pair of counterstreaming, ablatively driven plasma flows, in a supersonic, collisionless regime relevant to astrophysical collisionless shocks. The flows were created by irradiating a pair of opposing plastic (CH) foils with 1.8 kJ, 2-ns laser pulses on the OMEGA EP Laser System. Ultrafast laser-driven proton radiography was used to image the Weibel-generated electromagnetic fields. The experimental observations are in good agreement with the analytical theory of the Weibel instability and with particle-in-cell simulations.

Current singularities: Drivers of impulsive reconnectiona)

Reconnection in nature is generically not quasi-steady. Most often, it is impulsive or bursty, characterized not only by a fast growth rate but a rapid change in the time-derivative of the growth rate. New results, obtained by asymptotic analyses and high-resolution numerical simulations [using Adaptive Mesh Refinement] of the Hall magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) or two-fluid equations, are presented. Within the framework of Hall MHD, a two-dimensional collisionless reconnection model is considered in which electron inertia provides the mechanism for breaking field lines, and the electron pressure gradient plays a crucial role in controlling magnetic island dynamics. Current singularities tend to form in finite time and drive fast and impulsive reconnection. In the presence of resistivity, the tendency for current singularity formation slows down, but the reconnection rate continues to accelerate to produce large magnetic islands that eventually become of the order of the system size, quenching near-explosive ...

Linear plasmoid instability of thin current sheets with shear flow

This paper presents linear analytical and numerical studies of plasmoid instabilities in the presence of shear flow in high-Lundquist-number plasmas. Analysis demonstrates that the stability problem becomes essentially two dimensional as the stabilizing effects of shear flow become more prominent. Scaling results are presented for the two-dimensional instabilities. An approximate criterion is given for the critical aspect ratio of thin current sheets at which the plasmoid instability is triggered.

Fast magnetic reconnection in laser-produced plasma bubbles

Recent experiments have observed magnetic reconnection in high-energy-density, laser-produced plasma bubbles, with reconnection rates observed to be much higher than can be explained by classical theory. Based on fully kinetic particle simulations we find that fast reconnection in these strongly driven systems can be explained by magnetic flux pileup at the shoulder of the current sheet and subsequent fast reconnection via two-fluid, collisionless mechanisms. In the strong drive regime with two-fluid effects, we find that the ultimate reconnection time is insensitive to the nominal system Alfvén time.

Hall magnetohydrodynamic reconnection in the plasmoid unstable regime

A set of reduced Hall magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations are used to evaluate the stability of large aspect ratio current sheets to the formation of plasmoids (secondary islands). Reconnection is driven by resistivity in this analysis, which occurs at the resistive skin depth dη≡SL-1/2LνA/γ, where SL is the Lundquist number, L, the length of the current sheet, νA, the Alfven speed, and γ, the growth rate. Modifications to a recent resistive MHD analysis [N. F. Loureiro et al., Phys. Plasmas 14, 100703 (2007)] arise when collisions are sufficiently weak that dη is shorter than the ion skin depth di ≡ c/ωpi. Secondary islands grow faster in this Hall MHD regime: the maximum growth rate scales as (di/L)6/13SL7/13νA/L and the number of plasmoids as (di/L)1/13SL11/26, compared to SL1/4νA/L and S3/8, respectively, in resistive MHD.

The Plasma Simulation Code

This work describes the Plasma Simulation Code (psc), an explicit, electromagnetic particle-in-cell code with support for different order particle shape functions. We review the basic components of the particle-in-cell method as well as the computational architecture of the psc code that allows support for modular algorithms and data structure in the code. We then describe and analyze in detail a distinguishing feature of psc: patch-based load balancing using space-filling curves which is shown to lead to major efficiency gains over unbalanced methods and a previously used simpler balancing method.

Magnetic reconnection in high-energy-density laser-produced plasmasa)

Recently, novel experiments on magnetic reconnection have been conducted in laser-produced plasmas in a high-energy-density regime. Individual plasma bubbles self-generate toroidal, mega-gauss-scale magnetic fields through the Biermann battery effect. When multiple bubbles are created at small separation, they expand into one another, driving reconnection of this field. Reconnection in the experiments was reported to be much faster than allowed by both Sweet-Parker, and even Hall-MHD theories, when normalized to the nominal magnetic fields self-generated by single bubbles. Through particle-in-cell simulations (both with and without a binary collision operator), we model the bubble interaction at parameters and geometry relevant to the experiments. This paper discusses in detail the reconnection regime of the laser-driven experiments and reports the qualitative features of simulations. We find substantial flux-pileup effects, which boost the relevant magnetic field for reconnection in the current sheet. When this is accounted for, the normalized reconnection rates are much more in line with standard two-fluid theory of reconnection. At the largest system sizes, we additionally find that the current sheet is prone to breakup into plasmoids.

Comparison of multi-fluid moment models with particle-in-cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection

We introduce an extensible multi-fluid moment model in the context of collisionless magnetic reconnection. This model evolves full Maxwell equations, and simultaneously moments of the Vlasov-Maxwell equation for each species in the plasma. Effects like electron inertia and pressure gradient are self-consistently embedded in the resulting multi-fluid moment equations, without the need to explicitly solving a generalized Ohmss law. Two limits of the multi-fluid moment model are discussed, namely, the five-moment limit that evolves a scalar pressures for each species, and the ten-moment limit that evolves the full anisotropic, non-gyrotropic pressure tensor for each species. We first demonstrate, analytically and numerically, that the five-moment model reduces to the widely used Hall Magnetohydrodynamics (Hall MHD) model under the assumptions of vanishing electron inertia, infinite speed of light, and quasi-neutrality. Then, we compare ten-moment and fully kinetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) simulations of a large scale Harris sheet reconnection problem, where the ten-moment equations are closed with a local linear collisionless approximation for the heat flux. The ten-moment simulation gives reasonable agreement with the PIC results regarding the structures and magnitudes of the electron flows, the polarities and magnitudes of elements of the electron pressure tensor, and the decomposition of the generalized Ohms law. Possible ways to improve the simple local closure towards a nonlocal fully three-dimensional closure are also discussed.

The island coalescence problem: Scaling of reconnection in extended fluid models including higher-order moments

As modeling of collisionless magnetic reconnection in most space plasmas with realistic parameters is beyond the capability of todays simulations, due to the separation between global and kinetic length scales, it is important to establish scaling relations in model problems so as to extrapolate to realistic scales. Recently, large scale particle-in-cell simulations of island coalescence have shown that the time averaged reconnection rate decreases with system size, while fluid systems at such large scales in the Hall regime have not been studied. Here, we perform the complementary resistive magnetohydrodynamic (MHD), Hall MHD, and two fluid simulations using a ten-moment model with the same geometry. In contrast to the standard Harris sheet reconnection problem, Hall MHD is insufficient to capture the physics of the reconnection region. Additionally, motivated by the results of a recent set of hybrid simulations which show the importance of ion kinetics in this geometry, we evaluate the efficacy of the ten-moment model in reproducing such results.