Speaker
Description
The physical mechanisms responsible for the onset of magnetic reconnection during substorms are not well understood. Fully kinetic simulations can resolve the electron-scale physics essential to reconnection, but extending such models to the entire magnetosphere is computationally infeasible. As a result, the location and triggering mechanisms of reconnection must be studied using approaches that combine global MHD simulations with localized kinetic physics.
To investigate the onset of electron-scale magnetic reconnection and the processes that control it, we will perform global magnetohydrodynamic simulations with embedded particle-in-cell (MHD-EPIC), utilizing a newly developed adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) capability for the PIC component. In this framework, the MHD model describes the bulk magnetospheric dynamics, while kinetic PIC regions are embedded only where needed to capture reconnection physics. The AMR-PIC model enables ion-scale resolution in coarse PIC regions and electron-scale resolution in refined regions near reconnection sites.