Full particle simulation of the plasma sheet using adaptive mesh refinement technique Original Research Article

We have developed a new 2-1/2 dimensional electromagnetic particle code with adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) technique in an effort to give a self-consistent description of the dynamic change of the plasma sheet in association with magnetic reconnection, which includes multi-scale processes from the electron scale to the magnetohydrodynamic scale. The AMR technique dynamically subdivides the cells that satisfy a certain refinement criterion and it is quite effective to achieve high-resolution simulations such as those around the X-type neutral line. Our code is checked against several well known processes such as the Landau damping of the Langmuir waves and we show that the AMR technique is successfully applied to the conventional particle code. A preliminary result on the time evolution of the Harris-type current sheet using our code is also presented. The number of cells and particles are dramatically reduced by using the AMR.