Flexible Kinetic Coupling Model with FLEKS for Simulating Ganymede’s Magnetosphere

Abstract:

To capture the local kinetic processes within fluid simulations, we couple the MHD model BATS-R-US to the recently developed implicit kinetic particle-in-cell (PIC) model Flexible Exascale Kinetic Simulator (FLEKS). This new model allows the users to set flexible PIC regions based on geometric and physical criteria, and is more efficient in doing large scale parallelized simulations. The coupled model is applied to the magnetosphere simulation of Ganymede, with the high-resolution PIC region covering the entire magnetopause and tail current sheet. The prolific outputs of electrons and ions from kinetic simulation shed light on the reconnection driven physics across the entire magnetosphere that are not available in the simplified fluid description.