2D Hybrid Simulations of Plasma Transport by Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability at the Magnetopause

Details 2D Hybrid Simulations of Plasma Transport by Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability at the Magnetopause 2D Hybrid Simulations of Plasma Transport by Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability at the Magnetopause

Dec 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008agufmsm23a1681c&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2008, abstract #SM23A-1681

Physics

2724 Magnetopause And Boundary Layers, 2752 Mhd Waves And Instabilities (2149, 6050, 7836), 2753 Numerical Modeling, 2772 Plasma Waves And Instabilities (2471), 7859 Transport Processes

Scientific paper

In order to study the kinetic aspects of plasma mixing due to Kelvin Helmholtz instability at the magnetopause, we carry out two-dimensional hybrid simulations of this shear-driven instability. While MHD simulations have been popularly and successfully used to study Kelvin-Helmholtz instability as it is described by fluid theory, they cannot model certain important aspects of the instability behavior, such as mixing of magnetosheath and magnetosphere ions. We therefore use hybrid simulations which treat ions kinetically and electrons as a massless, charge-neutralizing fluid, to model the kinetic processes of interest. Our simulation is set up with velocity shear between the magnetosphere and magnetosheath plasma flows and B0 perpendicular to the plasma flow direction. Plasma density and magnetic field strength are non-uniform between the two sides, and their values are varied to see the effect on instability behavior. We look at different ways to quantify the plasma mixing and find that while the non-uniform density configuration yields smaller and less well-defined vortices than the uniform density, the number of simulation cells containing a mix of magnetosphere and magnetosheath plasma increases relatively linearly during the instability growth phase. In addition, we examine the velocity space distribution of the resultant ion populations in the interface region.

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