| NSF Org: |
AGS Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 13, 2012 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | April 3, 2014 |
| Award Number: | 1202603 |
| Award Instrument: | Continuing Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Carrie E. Black
cblack@nsf.gov (703)292-2426 AGS Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences GEO Directorate for Geosciences |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2012 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2016 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $425,993.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $425,993.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2013 = $136,543.00 FY 2014 = $140,387.00 |
| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3720 S FLOWER ST FL 3 LOS ANGELES CA US 90033 (213)740-7762 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
837 Downey Way, STO 315 Los Angeles CA US 90089-0143 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | SOLAR-TERRESTRIAL |
| Primary Program Source: |
01001314DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01001415DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.050 |
ABSTRACT
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.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Plasma, that is, ionized gas, is found throughout the universe. Understanding how such material behaves is fundamental to the understanding of space and astrophysical plasmas as well as to learning how to control and apply plasmas in many disciplines such as magnetic confinement and inertial confinement physics. Plasmas in both natural and laboratory states are frequently observed to be turbulent, a condition characterized by a large number of broadband, large-amplitude electric and magnetic field fluctuations. The state of plasma turbulence is a fundamentally nonlinear condition which requires the use of state-of-the-art computer simulations for its complete description. The research carried out under the funding for this project has demonstrated in general that particle-in-cell simulations are a powerful tool for the quantification of turbulent dissipation in a wide range of plasma applications including space, astrophysical, and laboratory plasmas. Furthermore, this research has shown specifically that plasma turbulence based upon whistler fluctuations can substantially heat both electrons and ions and has established the heating rates for both species in homogeneous collisionless plasmas as functions of several different plasma parameters. This research opens the door for the application of particle-in-cell computations to many different plasma turbulence research problems, and may well be the first of many applications of this technique to a more complete understanding of plasma turbulence throughout the universe.
Last Modified: 01/30/2017
Modified by: Stephen P Gary
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