Zhaoming Gan Attends Annual NSF SHINE Meeting

Zhaoming Gan Attends Annual NSF SHINE Meeting

New Mexico Consortium scientist, Zhaoming Gan, attended the Solar Heliospheric and Interplanetary Environment (SHINE) meeting held in Juneau, Alaska. The SHINE meeting is a gathering of researchers within the  solar, interplanetary, and heliospheric communities to promote understanding of the processes by which energy in the form of magnetic fields and particles are produced by the Sun and/or accelerated in interplanetary space and the mechanisms by which these fields and particles are transported to the Earth through the inner heliosphere The goal of SHINE activities is to enrich and strengthen both physical understanding and predictive capabilities for these phenomena.

While attending SHINE, together with his colleagues from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), University of Alabama in Huntsville, and University of Boston, Dr Gan, along with his LANL colleague Dr. Xiangrong Fu, posted their work on high-resolution simulations of solar wind turbulence, and showcased that direct numerical simulation of turbulence is now possible.

For many decades, turbulence has been thought as one of the most important unsolved problems of classical physics. Due to the complexity of turbulence, analytical study of it is extremely difficult. People have been thinking about “direct numerical simulations” of turbulence for decades since computers were invented.  However, the huge scale separation made it impossible until recent years.

Thanks to the computational power made available by LANL and NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center), Dr. Gan and his collaborators were able to make the most advanced magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) simulations of turbulence and use the solar winds as a turbulence laboratory to validate their modeling.

Dr. Gan found that their simulation results match extremely well with the in-situ measurements of solar winds by the Parker Solar Probe in threefold: (1) the mean profiles of solar winds e.g., mean velocity, density, temperature, and magnetic fields; (2) averaged fluctuations; and (3) turbulence spectra. Therefore, they claimed that they made “direct numerical simulations” of solar wind turbulence.

Based on the simulations and observations, the authors were able to study many important physics about the solar winds, i.e., how turbulence is developed in the solar winds, how it evolved during the wind advection, what is the origin of the observed density fluctuations in the solar winds, what is the role of waves in the fluctuations and even the wind acceleration itself, and so on.

Learn more about the SHINE Meeting at: https://helioshine.org/