Evolution and Particle Energization of the Electron Cyclotron Drift Instability

The electron cyclotron drift instability (ECDI) is often observed in the foot of heliospheric shocks and plays an important role in heating electrons and ions in collisionless shocks, as well as supplying anomalous resistivity. Although commonly observed in quasi-perpendicular interplanetary shocks and Earth's bowshock, the ECDI is a difficult instability to study in self-consistent particle-in-cell simulations of shocks, and isolated studies of the ECDI have generally been limited to simple geometries and initial conditions. Here, we present a study of the ECDI in a variety of conditions relevant to shocks by employing linear kinetic theory and the fully non-linear continuum Vlasov-Maxwell solver in the Gkeyll simulation framework. By drawing from perpendicular and quasi-perpendicular shock simulations, we employ realistic particle distributions as well as the full range of wavevectors available to the instability. In particular, we apply the field-particle correlation technique to examine the phase-space energization of electron and ions in the ECDI.