Numerical Simulation as a Tool for Studying Waves and Radiation in Space

Abstract: Plasma physics governs the area of interactions between charged particles. As 99% of the visible universe is in a plasma state, it is an important topic in astronomy and space physics, where we already at an altitude of 60 km reach the plasma environment surrounding our planet in the form of the ionosphere. The search for fusion, the source of power for the sun, as well as industrial use have been the main topics for earth bound plasma reasurch.A plasma is composed of charged particles which interact by the electromagnetic force. In the kinetic description, via the Vlasov-Maxwell equations, the system is described in terms of probability distribution functions for each particle species, expressed in terms of particles position and velocity. The particles interact via self-consistent fields as determined by Maxwell's equations. For understanding the complex behaviour of the system, we need numerical solvers. These come in two flavours, Lagrangian methods, dealing with the moving around of synthetic particles, and Eulerian methods, which solve the set of partial differential, Vlasov and Maxwell equations. To perform the computations within reasonable time, we need to distribute our calculations on multiple machines, i.e. parallel programming, with the best possible matching between our computational needs and the need of splitting algorithms to adapt to our processing environment.Paper I studies electron and ion beams within a Lagrangian and fluid model and compare the results with experimental observations. This is continued with studies of a full kinetic system, using an Eulerian solver, for a closer look at electron-ion interactions in relation to ionospheric observations, (Papers II and IV). To improve the performance of the Eulerian solver it was parallelised (Paper III). The thesis is ending with the possibility to observe ultrahigh energy neutrinos from an orbiting satellite by using the Moon's surface as a detector Paper V.