Fully Kinetic 2-D and 3-D Simulations of the Farley-Buneman Instability: First Results

Details Fully Kinetic 2-D and 3-D Simulations of the Farley-Buneman Instability: First Results Fully Kinetic 2-D and 3-D Simulations of the Farley-Buneman Instability: First Results

May 2002

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2002agusmsa41a..11o&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2002, abstract #SA41A-11

Physics

2471 Plasma Waves And Instabilities, 2411 Electric Fields (2712), 2439 Ionospheric Irregularities

Scientific paper

The Farley-Buneman instability is a collisional two-stream plasma instability observed in the electrojet of the E region ionosphere. This instability, along with the related gradient drift instability, creates much of the common E-region radar clutter. While linear theory predicts the dominant wavelengths generated by this instability, radars and rocket-borne instruments make measurements of the nonlinearly saturated instability. In the last the last decade numerical simulations have become an important tool in exploring the nonlinear behavior of this instability. However, these simulations have been limited to 2-D and generally have represented electron dynamics with a fluid model while resolving ions kinetically with a particle-in-cell method (PIC) [see Oppenheim, et. al., Geophys.~Res.~Lett., 1996] or they have failed to reach saturation [Janhunen, J.~Geophys.~Res., 1994]. Today, taking advantage of modern, massively parallel, supercomputers, we can represent electron dynamics using a fully kinetic PIC algorithm. This allows us to simulate electron temperature variations as well as kinetic effects instead of making a simplifying set of assumptions about electron evolution. In this paper we will present the first results from a new set of 2 and 3 dimensional simulations of the kinetic Farley-Buneman instability. We compare the instability evolution with those calculated by older 2-D hybrid simulations with fluid electrons. Further we evaluate electron heating effects and the implications for the ionosphere.

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