Global Magnetosphere

The terrestrial magnetosphere can rapidly accelerate charged particles up to very high energies over relatively short times and distances, leading to an intensification of near-Earth currents that can impact technological systems. These energetic particles are injected from the magnetotail (the side of our magnetosphere that is stretched by the solar wind away from the Sun) into the inner magnetosphere and closer to the Earth through two primary mechanisms: potential-driven convection and inductive drifts. Potential-driven convection occurs when the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) carried by the solar wind is pointing south. This means it opposes the direction of Earth’s internal field, allowing part of the solar wind electric field to effectively map down into the polar ionosphere. The second transport process, the inductive drift, is caused by intense electric fields created by magnetotail collapse events and has a localized nature, as opposed to the potential-driven convection which is a large scale phenomena. Both transport mechanisms contribute to the development of geomagnetic storms.

A key question in geospace research is assessing the relative contribution of potential and inductive electric field to the overall convection and to the development of the storm-time ring current. Prof. Ilie has pioneered the introduction of inductive electric field calculations into state-of-the-art global magnetospheric model (BATS-R-US), and to enable a consistent and physically accurate coupling of this model to kinetic models of the inner magnetosphere. This challenging task has not been addressed by previous models, and stands to improve our understanding of geomagnetic storms, and predicting how they change the near-Earth plasma and electromagnetic environment during storms.