Global Hybrid-VPIC Simulations of the Solar Wind Interaction with Mercury's Dynamic Magnetosphere: Reconnection and Foreshock
- 1Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States (dcfy@princeton.edu)
- 2Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States
- 3University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, United States
- 4NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States
We explore the dynamic magnetosphere of Mercury by employing a three‐dimensional hybrid particle-in-cell (particle ions and massless fluid electrons) code – hybrid-VPIC. The newly developed hybrid-VPIC code (based on the high-performance fully kinetic Vector Particle-In-Cell, VPIC code) incorporates ion kinetics (beam and anisotropy driven instabilities) that are critical for foreshock and magnetosheath physics, as well as the Hall effect which is important for collisionless magnetic reconnection; therefore, it is particularly well suited for investigating the kinetic physics of Mercury's dynamic magnetosphere. The simulation results are in good agreement with MESSENGER’s magnetic field measurements during its second Mercury flyby. We will investigate collisionless magnetic reconnection (including flux transfer events or FTEs and ion velocity distribution functions) and foreshock physics (including plasma turbulence and particle acceleration) in this study.
How to cite: Dong, C., Le, A., Wang, L., Stanier, A., Wetherton, B., Daughton, W., Bhattacharjee, A., Slavin, J., and DiBraccio, G.: Global Hybrid-VPIC Simulations of the Solar Wind Interaction with Mercury's Dynamic Magnetosphere: Reconnection and Foreshock, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-12954, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-12954, 2021.
