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FLUID AND KINETIC MODELLING OF THE MAGNETIZED KELVIN-HELMHOLTZ INSTABILITY

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The nonlinear evolution of collisionless plasma flows is a multi-scale process where the energy is injected at large, fluid scales and dissipated at small, kinetic scales. Accurately modelling the global evolution of collisionless plasmas requires to take into account the main micro-scale physical processes of interest, in particular the kinetic effects. We concentrate here on the nonlinear evolution of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability in collisionless plasmas.
First, we will summarize recent works concerning fluid and kinetic modelling of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. Comparisons of different plasma models is today an imperative task aiming at understanding cross-scale processes in collisionless plasma turbulence. We then report new results of two dimensional fully kinetic (both electrons and ions are treated kinetically) simulations of the magnetized Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. We make use of the implicit Particle-In-Cell (PIC) code iPIC3D in 2D-3V configuration.
In this work, we focus on the analysis of the effects of kinetic physics and compare results obtained with the full kinetic model to those obtained in the context of MHD and hybrid simulations. We discuss the space physics implications of the nonlinear saturation of the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, in the context of the interactions between the solar wind and the Earth magnetosphere.

Author(s):

Pierre Henri    
Laboratoire Lagrange, CNRS, Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, Nice, France
France

Francesco Califano    
Dipartimento di fisica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Italy

Stefano Markidis    
PDC Center for High Performance Computing, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
Sweden

Matteo Faganello    
Laboratoire de PIIM, UMR6633, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France
France

Giovanni Lapenta    
Centrum voor Plasma-Astrofysica, Departement Wiskunde, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
Belgium

Francesco Pegoraro    
Dipartimento di fisica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
Italy