Using the maximum entropy distribution to describe electrons in reconnecting current sheets

Abstract

Particle distributions in weakly collisional environments such as the magnetosphere have been observed to show deviations from the Maxwellian distribution. These can often be reproduced in kinetic simulations, but fluid models, which are used in global simulations of the magnetosphere, do not necessarily capture any of this. We apply the maximum entropy fluid closure of Levermore, which leads to well posed moment equations, to reconstruct particle distributions from a kinetic simulation in a reconnection region. Our results show that without information other than the moments, the model can reproduce the general structure of the distributions but not all of the finer details. The advantages of the closure over the traditional Grad closure are also discussed.

References in corpus (6)

• Comparison of multi-fluid moment models with Particle-in-Cell simulations of collisionless magnetic reconnection
• Enhanced Electron Mixing and Heating in 3D Asymmetric Reconnection at the Earth's Magnetopause
• The island coalescence problem: scaling of reconnection in extended fluid models including higher-order moments
• Entropic 13 Moment Equations from Boltzmann's Kinetic Equation
• In-situ evidence of electron energization in the electron diffusion region of magnetotail reconnection
• Temperature gradient driven heat flux closure in fluid simulations of collisionless reconnection

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• 14-moment maximum-entropy modelling of collisionless ions for Hall thruster discharges
• Electron cyclotron drift instability and anomalous transport: two-fluid moment theory and modeling
• A Parallel-Kinetic-Perpendicular-Moment Model for Magnetized Plasmas