HLRB Project pr26wu
Simulations of particle acceleration in counterstreaming plasmas
Lehrstuhl für Astronomie, Uni Würzburg
Proposing Institution
Lehrstuhl für Astronomie, Uni Würzburg
Project Manager
Dr. Felix Spanier
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
Abstract
In various astrophysical phenomena, such as active galactic nuclei (AGNs), gamma-ray-bursts (GRBs) or supernova explosions cosmic rays with energies up to 10^20eV are generated. This can be accomplished by either plasma-instabilities like the filamentation instability or by Fermi-acceleration at shocks.In this field there are still a lot of things that need to be researched. One is the simulation of plasmas with proton-to-electron mass-ratios in the order of 100 up to the real value of 1837. In this case it's very difficult to resolve the different acceleration timescales of the species. Another one is to realize plasmas with different compositions (electrons, ions, positrons, ...) and different magnetic field backgrounds (parallel, perpendicular or in another angle to the direction of the flow).All this can be simulated by our 3-dimensional, fully relativistic, MPI-parallelized Particle-in-Cell-Code. The c++-Code scales very well with the number of processors and was tested so far up to 64.In order to better resolve the shocks with the PiC-Code we would need to simulate on 512^3 cells, which then needs more than 10^9 particles, so it should be distributed to ~512 cores. Therefore the HLRB II would be very well suited for our project.
