A Kinetic-magnetohydrodynamic Model with Adaptive Mesh Refinement for Modeling Heliosphere Neutral-plasma Interaction

Abstract

The charge exchange between the interstellar medium and the solar wind plasma is crucial for determining the structures of the heliosphere. Since both the neutral-ion and neutral–neutral collision mean free paths are either comparable to or larger than the size of the heliosphere, the neutral phase space distribution can deviate far away from the Maxwellian distribution. A kinetic description for the neutrals is crucial for accurately modeling the heliosphere. It is computationally challenging to run three-dimensional time-dependent kinetic simulations due to the large number of macroparticles. In this paper, we present the new highly efficient Solar Wind with Hydrogen Ion Exchange and Large-scale Dynamics-2 model with a kinetic model of neutrals and a magnetohydrodynamic model for the ions and electrons. To improve the simulation efficiency, we implement adaptive mesh refinement and particle splitting and merging algorithms for the neutral particles to reduce the particle number that is required for an accurate simulation. We present several tests to verify and demonstrate the capabilities of the model.