Steady-State Hybrid Simulations of Quasi-Parallel Shocks

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Session 40 -- Computational Astrophysics I
Display presentation, Wednesday, 1, 1994, 9:20-6:30

[40.07] Steady-State Hybrid Simulations of Quasi-Parallel Shocks

Lee Bennett (NCSU), Donald C. Ellison (NCSU)

We have developed a means of producing a steady-state hybrid simulation of a collisionless shock. The shock is stopped in the simulation box by making the downstr eam boundary partially transparent, and once stopped, the simulation can be run for an arbitrary time with a fixed box size and a fixed number of simulation particles. Gros s properties associated with the shock, such as the particle distribution function (including energetic particles produced by Fermi acceleration) and the flow speed profile, are shown to be constant (except for statistical variations) over 100's of gyroperiods, implying that any microphysical processes responsible for particle heating and/or injection into the Fermi mechanism, are constant when averaged over a few gyroperiods. In addition, we have calculated mean free paths for particles upstream and downstream of the shock and used these values as input for a steady-state Monte Carlo simulation to yield comparisons between the two simulation methods.

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