Turbulence Research for Environmental & Astrophysical Transport (TREAT) at the University of Delaware

Simulations of Plasma Turbulence

(1) Movie 1:- Kinetic (particle-in-cell or "PIC") simulation of plasma turbulence in a 2.5D representation on a 8192 x 8192 grid. The axis labels are distance measured in ion inertial scales. Time t is measured in gyroperiods. (Penny Wu).

(2) Movie 2:- Magnetic reconnection in a fluid, 2D magnetohydrodynamics model, in the presence of a small amount of initial added random fluctuation energy. Time span is 9 Alfven crossing times of unit distance. Shown are magnetic field lines (upper left), electric current density (upper right), vorticity (lower left) and streamlines (lower right). The simulation and movie were done by S. L. Lamkin and W. H. MattHaeus in 1981 and shown at the 1981 Fall American Geophysical Union Meeting.

(3) Movie 3:- Same as Movie 2, but over a time period of 20 Alfven transit times. In each case there are 500 frames, each rendered separately by S. L. Lamkin on a Tektronix green phosphor graphics terminal at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton VA. The computations were done on a Control Data Corporation Cyber 203 vector computer at LARC.

(4) Movie 4:- Video describing magnetic reconnection in space and in a kinetic plasma simulation. (M. Shay).

(5) Movie 5:- A particle-in-cell simulation of magnetic reconnection in a collisionless plasma. (M. Shay).