SPRG Seminars

September 11, 2012:

"Shock acceleration of particles"

Arto Sandroos, Space Science Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley

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Diffusive shock acceleration of particles is believed to be an ubiquitous mechanism in space plasmas, operating, for example, near shocks driven by coronal mass ejections (CME) in solar corona and interplanetary (IP) space and planetary bow shocks. In the former case shock-accelerated particles are observed in solar energetic particle events in which maximum ion
energies are typically in range of 10-100 MeV per nucleon. Particles accelerated at Earth's bow shock, although being limited to modest energies, are responsible for ion and electron foreshocks.

In this seminar I describe the work I did on my PhD thesis, consisting of numerical modeling of shock acceleration under coronal conditions, where the emphasis was on the importance of global magnetic geometry and its effect on ions' properties in the SEP event that follows. Currently I am developing a more detailed self-consistent numerical model which is being applied to Earth's bow shock. As a part of present work a massively parallel simulation platform, Corsair, has been released under GPL license. The research project is funded by the Academy of Finland.