The Principal Investigator's team will perform 3D electromagnetic particle-in-cell simulations of whistler turbulence in a joint effort by the University of Southern California (USC) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), in order to understand the evolution of whistler turbulence and its role in energy transport and distribution in the solar wind and astrophysical plasmas. This team will study how the Earth and the heliosphere respond to small-scale, microscopic plasma processes created by turbulence, which may significantly affect the energy and momentum transport at the macroscopic scale in the interconnected Sun-heliosphere-Earth system. This team will also apply high performance computing techniques to plasma physics research through simulating the collective behavior of tens to hundreds of billions of particles on state-of-the-art, massively parallel supercomputers architectures using terabytes of memory. This research will lead to improved understanding of the effects of micro-scale plasma processes on the global dynamics of the macro-scale plasma systems that control the geospace environment.
This research will provide modeling tools and physics parameters that will be relevant to the data analysis and mission planning to be performed for upcoming spacecraft missions. These results will also directly contribute to improving space weather predictions and will support and sustain a collaborative research infrastructure between an academic institution and a government research laboratory. This project will support a graduate student's Ph.D. dissertation, and will contribute to additional education and training through the incorporation of the research results and computational models developed in this study into graduate-level plasma physics and computational simulation courses at USC.
