Acceleration Mechanisms

Self-generated turbulence can enhance particle transport and acceleration in 3D reconnection. Simulations use VPIC with diagnostics from Post-Analysis-VPIC.

active

We run trillion-particle VPIC simulations alongside many diagnostics and analysis tools to quantify how particles are accelerated by magnetic reconnection, shocks, and turbulence. Our goal is to incorporate these results into transport solvers to predict energetic particle fluxes in solar and astrophysical environments.

What’s happening

• Exascale VPIC runs — Launching trillion-particle GPU campaigns to study how reconnection-generated turbulence impacts particle acceleration and transport.
• Transport model handoff — Feeding reduced acceleration rates and diffusion coefficients into transport solvers to predict energetic particle fluxes.
• Observatory alignment — Comparing simulation results with in-site measurements from Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, and MMS to validate acceleration mechanisms.
• AI-driven analysis — Developing machine-learning tools to identify acceleration sites and classify particle trajectories in large datasets.

Resources

Featured publications

• Power-law acceleration in nonrelativistic reconnection
  X. Li et al. — PoP (2021) — read
• 3D reconnection and electron power laws
  X. Li et al. — ApJ (2019) — read
• Acceleration during low-β reconnection
  X. Li — ApJ (2017) — read

If you’d like to benchmark your observations and experimental data against our simulations results, please reach out; we routinely share reduced data products and analysis notebooks.