HR: 0800h
AN: SM51A-05    [Abstracts]
TI: Adiabatic Plasma Equilibria With Applications to Magnetic Reconnection
AU: * Zaharia, S
EM: szaharia@lanl.gov
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS D466, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545, United States
AU: Birn, J
EM: jbirn@lanl.gov
AF: Los Alamos National Laboratory, MS D466, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545, United States
AB: A novel numerical code for computing plasma equilibria with adiabatic (entropy) inputs is introduced. As opposed to prescribing the current or pressure profiles for plasma equilibrium (which leads to the conventional Grad- Shafranov elliptic partial differential equation), prescribing the entropy results in a nonstandard differential equation whose solution by usual iterative techniques is not guaranteed. To solve this equation we have developed a numerical code based on the "alternating dimensions method" (ADM) suggested by Grad et al., [1975]; the code finds adiabatic equilibria by solving iteratively the 2-D equilibrium partial differential equation and a 1-D ODE obtained from averaging it over magnetic flux surfaces. The code is applied to the "Newton Challenge" forced reconnection geometry, and the resulting equilibria with various boundary deformations are compared with snapshots from dynamic MHD simulations of the forced reconnection problem. The method has wide applications in space plasmas, and can be used to compute magnetospheric and solar corona configurations, as well as the "quasi-static" evolution of such equilibria under entropy conservation constraints.
DE: 7833 Mathematical and numerical techniques (0500, 3200)
DE: 7835 Magnetic reconnection (2723, 7526)
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: 2007 Joint Assembly