Modeling comet ion trails

Summary form only given. The goal of this paper is to model the interaction of electromagnetic (EM) waves with the ion tail of a comet using ICEPIC (Improved Concurrent Electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell) code. In order to simplify this complicated system as much as possible, a uniform, low-density, two-dimensional plasma was used. This plasma was placed in a vacuum and surrounded by PML (wave-absorbing material). The radius of the plasma was set at 2*10/sup 7/ meters (the estimated size of an actual ion tail) and the plasma was placed in the x-y plane. Initially, a plane wave generator was used to send EM waves through the plasma, with the electric field polarized in the z-direction. When a frequency sweep was run between 4 and 22 Hz and |E/sub z/| was plotted vs. frequency for specific points in the system, oscillations were observed. The most violent of these occurred on the left edge of the plasma. Three frequencies were chosen for further analysis: 4.68 Hz at a peak, 7.29 Hz at the next trough, and the intermediate frequency, 5.98 Hz.