Multiscale plasma particle simulation toward development of interplanetary flight system

Abstract

Space plasma phenomena occur in multiscale processes from the electron scale to the magnetohydrodynamic one. To investigate such multiscale phenomena including plasma kinetic effects, we started to develop a new electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code with an adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique. The AMR technique can generate and remove hierarchical cells dynamically. A prototype of the code has been completed, and we have been working on code parallelization with a dynamic domain-decomposition scheme using message passing interface (MPI) to achieve load balance among processors. As an application, we have been investigating the solar wind interaction with a small dipole magnetic field structure for the analysis of the magneto plasma sail (MPS) proposed as an innovative interplanetary flight system by JAXA.