Dr. Masaharu Matsumoto, Usui group, Usui team, has been awarded "IEEJ Excellent Presentation Award" for "Development of Electromagnetic Hybrid-PIC Plasma Simulation Code for Magneto-Plasma Sail".

[Researcher］
Masaharu Matsumoto
(Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.
(Currently) Assistant Professor, Graduate School of System Infomatics, Kobe University)

[Award Date]
Feb. 9, 2012

[Award Name]
IEEJ Excellent Presentation Award,
The Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (No.4, 2012)

[Contents］
A discretization procedure for a total variation diminishing (TVD) scheme is introduced to an electromagnetic hybrid particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulation code in order to suppress the numerical oscillation when calculating the plasma flow field in which magnetic field discontinuities (for example, Rankine-Hugoniot jump conditions for shock waves) are generated. Furthermore, two-dimensional simulations of solar wind plasma flow around magnetic sail have been conducted to examine the scale dependency of the magnetic sail.