Gyrokinetic Particle Simulation of Kinetic Alfven Wave

Random magnetic fluctuations resembling Alfven waves are ubiquitously observed in laboratory, space and astrophysical plasmas. The issue of spectral cascade and plasma heating in Alfvenic turbulence is a major unsolved problem in space plasma physics. Gyrokinetic particle simulation is applied in this work to study the cascade and heating in Alfvenic turbulence with fully self-consistent nonlinear kinetic effects. A Coarse-grained MPI/openMP parallelization strategy has been used for large scale simulation. A massively parallel, electromagnetic, kinetic, non-linear, particle-in-cell code with gyrokinetic ions and fluid-kinetic hybrid electrons is being developed to study the coupling between shear Alfven wave and ion acoustic wave, which lead to energy exchange between waves and particles.